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Private museums are idiosyncratic and indifferent, says David Walsh, a professional gambler who built his own museum in Tasmania. His collection is broad, eclectic and unashamedly personal.When Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, had sex with Zeus, the god of creation, for nine consecutive nights, she conceived the nine Muses, from which we derive our word ‘museum’. Since its very inception, then, the museum has had dual roles: remembering the old and creating the new; of protecting the past from the future while also constructing the future by reproducing the past in certain ways.In early 2011, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) opened its doors in Hobart, Australia, to showcase the country’s most extensive and controversial private art collection. Cut into Triassic sandstone on the bank of the Derwent River, the three-storey subterranean building by Australian architect Nonda Katsalidis is cavernous and dim, and the museum’s benefactor David Walsh revels in the perversion of having a built waterfront museum without any windows. With contemporary artworks vying next to Neolithic artefacts; Mesoamerican, Roman, Hellenic, Egyptian and African antiquities; Australian modernist painting and more, the presentation goes against all conventions of museological categorisation. The deliberately disorienting layout is designed to keep us alert, and the art is arranged so as to give rise to unexpected associations between disparate things. ‘Specialisation allows us to be very efficient,’ says Walsh, ‘but its evil twin brother compartmentalisation allows us to shut things down and deny contradictions we’d rather not acknowledge.’When I met Walsh on the weekend of the museum’s Wim Delvoye exhibition opening in December, I asked him about the global rise of large private museums in recent years. He said it is just indicative of the rising inequality in the distribution of wealth – women probably do it out of guilt about their fortunes, he added, while men only do it out of ego. For the introduction to MONA’s mammoth hard-cover book Monanisms, he wrote, ‘It’s reasonable to assume that anyone engaging in a farrago of conceits on the scale of building their own museum must be feeling the need to show off. It’s not my fault. It’s Darwin’s.’ He has often used the analogy of peacock preening, insisting that his motivations are purely epigamic, that he’s only displaying his feathers for attention, and that the artworks he owns are all products of the same evolutionary biological drives to get more sex and to avoid death.Broad and eclectic as Walsh’s $AUD100 million collection is, it is also unashamedly idiosyncratic – as all private collections should be. He employs a team of curators, but the art obviously revolves around his own predilections, and running motifs include mortality and sex, mythology and worship, scatology and the abject, corporeality and corpses. He uses another animal analogy to compare public and private museums: ‘Public museums are dogs, they roam in packs, they’re easy to get along with, they want you to like them – private museums are cats, they’re indifferent, you can’t hurt them, and they do what they’re going to do.’ With no board of trustees to please and none of the responsibilities that come with using public money, the irresponsibility of the private collector can evidently be good for the art. In Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘Public collections may be less offensive from the social standpoint, more useful from the academic standpoint than private ones – but it is only in the latter that things, items, receive their due.’ The Museum of Old and New Art is clearly not the first to disregard the historic and geographic contexts of the objects in its display – Andre Breton’s atelier at 42 Rue Fontaine in the early twentieth century comes to mind, and long before that there are the wunderkammers of Renaissance Europe, which have often been cited as a source of inspiration for MONA’s model. Idiosyncratic microcosms of culture, these curiosity cabinets conveyed ownership and control of the world through its contained reproduction. Several modern wunderkammers have been assembled at MONA, including a towering aquarium with live fish swimming between all of Walsh’s antiquities and ethnographic artefacts that have had their authenticity contested.Importantly for Walsh, things in the private wunderkammer defied categorisation and weren’t prescriptively identified – according to him, it was only in the eighteenth century, when public access to some of the cabinets started to be granted, that informative labels were added to the objects. From the very early stages of planning his museum, he knew he didn’t want there to be any labelling or explanatory wall text. In the age of the internet, he insists, there’s no longer any need for interpretive material – gallery goers can go home and look things up themselves. Instead of wall text or room sheets, MONA developed the ‘O’, an iPhone-like device that visitors are equipped with upon arrival. The hand-held mechanism tracks where individuals are located inside the museum, and by pushing a button they can get the specs on what they’re looking at (they can also elect for additional ‘Art Wank’ on a particular work by pressing a phallus icon). Designed to remove any pre-judged responses or imposed expectations, the O also saves everyone’s trajectories online so they can revisit all the works they saw on their tours, virtually, at any time.Setting out to mess with academic notions of certainty and authority, MONA suggests that the ‘neutrality’ of the modernist white cube was in fact anything but neutral. While planning his museum and thinking about possible models for presenting his heterogeneous collection, Walsh was taken by the exhibition Artempo: Where Time Becomes Art at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, 2007. Bringing together applied art, objets trouvé, zoological, ethnographic and archaeological material, and classical, medieval, modern and contemporary art, the exhibition abandoned chronology in order to facilitate symbiotic relationships between pasts and presents. Walsh subsequently tracked down one of the exhibition’s organisers, Jean-Hubert Martin, and had him join the team of curators at MONA.Martin (who is best known for his ground-breaking 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Pompidou Centre) is currently working on a polychronic show [where different times exist simultaneously – ed.] for MONA in mid-2012 that will draw from Walsh’s collection and the nearby Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery. While MONA’s current Wim Delvoye exhibition felt like a fist full of one-liners being shoved down my throat via an expensive apparatus of cheap tricks, this next show is promising to be genuinely critical, thoughtful and nuanced, building on complex questions that are already being raised about the ways in which we ought to deal with old and new material culture. This is when the Museum of Old and New Art is at its best; when it’s showing us how knowledge and memory constantly shift, ideas are never isolated, art isn’t sequential and history isn’t linear. If Blaise Pascal was right that ‘curiosity is only vanity’, David Walsh’s vanity is something we can all be grateful for.Amelia Groom is an art writer based in Sydney