Objects, when touched by fame or infamy, often gain a rare mystique. This allure is only broken when the historical connection becomes a fiction. Take Head of a Man (1886), a painting supposedly done by the Dutch great Vincent van Gogh (1853-90). The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Australia proudly displayed this work for decades as an obscure addition done by the Dutch master—that is, before it was found to be a fake. It may no longer receive prime position at that institution, but it does in the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)’s “Namedropping,” a new exhibition mapping the contours and complexities of status and celebrity.
The Australian show is interested in how art and ephemera gain power and potency through their associations with history—or rejection from it. The Van Gogh painting, the only horizontal portrait formerly attributed to the painter (a fact that led to its undoing), was only the second Australia-owned piece by the post-Impressionist. It’s why MONA chose to spotlight the inauthentic portrait, alongside other genuine artworks, in an exercise examining the nature of historical allure.
Developed over four years and featuring about 250 works, “Namedropping” is MONA’s largest show in a decade and extends over fifteen enormous rooms. The gallery is notorious in Australia, especially for its provocative displays—like Cloaca Professional (2010), a self-regulating “poo machine,” or Hermann Nitsch’s performative bull slaughter in 2017—and the unabashed flamboyance of its founder, David Walsh, who made his millions as part of a gambling syndicate known as the “Bank Roll.”
The iconoclastic museum argues that these “special objects and their history give us a sense of having acquired something of themselves.” There’s a rare book that belonged to mathematician Isaac Newton; David Bowie’s handwritten notes detailing lyrics for 1972’s “Starman” (which Walsh has acknowledged he “paid too much” for); and an array of celebrity autographs, including from the cast of Casablanca.
Here, everything from pop culture memorabilia to classical paintings clashes and collapses haphazardly under a unifying theme: the specter of status. (And as a reminder of the glamor of MONA’s many prized finds.) There are some expected pieces, like Warhol silkscreens, and even some perverse ones. Cornelia Parker’s (1956–) Shared Fate (Oliver) (1998) is a severed Oliver Twist doll, a toy supposedly guillotined by the same blade that struck Marie Antoinette. It’s metonymic of the comic incongruity—a children’s toy brutally cut with an infamous blade—of the gallery’s approach to reckoning with notoriety, one that only gets more discordant as the exhibition unfolds.
Not too far away is He Xiangyu’s (1986–) Tank Project (2011–13), a deflated lifesize army tank stitched together by Italian leather that dominates an entire room. The tank is intended as a replica of a T-34 combat vehicle that rolled into Tiananmen Square in 1989. Sewn together by Chinese factory workers over several years, the flattened symbol of military might is recast as a bloated and aberrant house accessory, nodding to the embrace of capitalism and consumerism in post-Mao China. It reeks of leather and smells rich.
There are no wall texts against the works, so visitors must use their phones for a choose-your-own-adventure experience. The O, the gallery’s bespoke phone app, lights the pathway in the largely dark and subterranean halls, offering wry categories (like “art wank” or “gonzo”) to illuminate these often cryptic pieces. It adds to the distance reserved for these eclectic artworks while also compounding the flattened, indiscriminate sequencing.
Sometimes controversy infuses a work with power; sometimes reverence does. Of the former, Carl Andre’s (1935–2024) 144 Tin Square (1969) is a benign enough series of metal plates nodding to scientific systems. But visitors unfamiliar with the artist are alerted through the O that Andre was tried (and acquitted) for the second-degree murder of his second wife, Ana Mendieta. Bad publicity isn’t always a bad thing, MONA argues, having showcased other art from similarly criminal figures, like Australian mobster Mark “Chopper” Read.
SEE ALSO: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Artist Ana Mendieta, Her Mysterious Death and Cult Resurgence
A forceful exhibit is Power Vest 6 (2020), a wry overlap of the legacies of neoliberalism and class exploitation by New Zealand artist Simon Denny (1982–). The puffer jacket is made from a scarf supposedly once worn by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. There’s a clever metaphor in the garment, with puffer vests typically aimed to protect from the cold, created no less by someone who refused to protect one class of worker in 1980s Britain. Denny also chose to emblazon it with a Salesforce logo—the technology behemoth a stand-in for Big Tech—as a reminder of the ubiquitous forces of branding and sponsorship today.
Intrinsic ciphers, elsewhere, are buried in relics from both history and modern living. Danh Vō’s (1975–) 16:32, 26.05 (2009), a disassembled chandelier that once sat in the room where the Paris Peace Accords were signed, ending the Vietnam War. Not too far away in the last hall is a plasticized Big Mac burger, the protagonist of Emma Bugg’s (1981–) Big Mac Brooch (2016). The burger was first purchased a decade ago and, alarmingly, wears few signs of deterioration while encased in a brooch clasp. It reflects the noxious underside of our frictionless, fast-food lifestyles, a recognizable food product that indeed may outlast many of the other artifacts (such as the fragile Bowie “Starman” lyrics) on display.
Like the celebrity autographs peppering “Namedropping” (the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe), the small presence of an association—like a movie star’s scrawling—elevates an object’s worth to a majestical level. (Sometimes it also diminishes the value if it’s faked. Still, MONA might disagree on this point.) But with the disorder sometimes found in the cavernous halls, where Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel meets a first-edition copy of Shakespeare’s collected plays amongst 200-plus other pieces, there’s a perplexing feeling walking the floors against these rarefied displays.
“Namedropping” is a beguiling exercise in all, probing the way status enchants us—via celebrity souvenirs, fabrics once touched by our most powerful and even fake art—with discordant randomness. MONA, with its disjointed pieces and silent walls, vainly stresses how our desire to encounter eminence or witness notoriety plays such a constant role in our lives. But the indiscriminate execution, lacking wall displays and collapsing endless pieces together, may make you wonder: Is MONA really musing on these rarefied pieces or simply bragging about its lush loot? Given the self-satisfied tone and proud display of its alluring finds, it’s a question worth asking.
“Namedropping” is on view at the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, through April 21, 2025.
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