Sorry NGV, NGA and the AGNSW, Hobart’s Museum of Old New Art has just been name-checked in Time Out’s new DO List, an illustrious bucket list we’re calling the 50 best things to do in the world right now.
The DO List was created to help people discover the best things to do around the world and was curated from more than 5,000 recommendations by roughly 200 expert writers and editors in over 400 destinations worldwide, as well as suggestions from around 15,000 of our readers. Leading the list is the kaleidoscopic world of polka dots, pumpkins and mirrors that you’ll find at Tokyo’s Yayoi Kusama Museum, followed by visiting a House of Yes party in New York’s Bushwick neighbourhood and going for a soak in an out-of-the-world sauna in Kiruna, Sweden.
Coming in at number six? Tassie’s very own MONA. Australia’s island state might seem an unlikely place for a world-class museum, but then a lot of things about MONA are unlikely. It’s built underground, carved into the sandstone cliffs of the Berriedale Peninsula; it’s best reached by a high-speed, camo-painted ferry from Hobart’s waterfront; and it’s funded by the gambling proceeds of owner David Walsh.
Photograph: MONA/Jesse Hunniford
This year we were very excited by the opening of the Pharos Wing – the first expansion since MONA opened in 2011 – described by Walsh as ‘a testimonial to the power of light as art’. It’s one of the only places in the world right now where you can experience one of James Turrell’s perceptual cells: a fully immersive, hallucinatory light bath. This one, ‘Unseen Seen’, is housed in a silver sphere, lasts a full 15 minutes and is meant to be experienced in pairs. Read about what happened when we spent 15 minutes inside it.