Stephen J. Shanabrook's chocolate sculpture of a mutiliated suicide bomber will be on display at MONA. (Image by Shanbrook.)

Cristina Ruiz has an interesting piece in the Utne Reader about the opening the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania. It’s an eccentric  temple to secularism built by 49-year-old entrepreneur David Walsh. It sounds like an attempt to create a permanent version of the more pungent, button-pushing elements of Sensation. (Thanks Marginal Revolution.) An excerpt:

“Finally, there is the international contemporary art. Walsh owns some 300 works, and more have been commissioned for the opening of MONA. These include an untitled 1998 installation by Jannis Kounellis that incorporates seven rotting beef carcasses and a new version of Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca. The machine, which simulates the human digestive process, creates excrement that is apparently indistinguishable from the real thing.

The smell of rotting beef and excrement may be too much for some visitors, but to Walsh they are important. ‘Aren’t we just machines for manufacturing shit?’ he asks.

Some visitors may find these displays shocking, a reaction Walsh welcomes. ‘There’s a lot of controversial stuff [that will go on display]. And, hopefully, it will cause a backlash because that’s how you attract visitors—and also I want to get some discussion going.’

Other works likely to produce strong responses include Stephen J. Shanabrook’s On the Road to Heaven the Highway to Hell, a chocolate sculpture depicting the mutilated body of a suicide bomber, and Gregory Green’s Bible Bomb #1854 (Russian style), a mixed media ‘bomb’ in a Bible.”