Museum of Old and New Art
Hobart, Australia

As the ferry glides down the River Derwent, the Museum of Old and New Art slinks into view, set high on the sandstone cliffs just outside Hobart, Tasmania, like a villain’s lair. It even has an appropriately Bond-baddie nickname: MONA. She is deviously designed, a geometric behemoth of concrete and Cor-Ten steel, by Melbourne architects Fender Katsalidis. Within are the types of artworks that an eccentric millionaire would own — the kind that would set stuffy museum donors on edge. It’s exactly the sort of museum you don’t find in New York City or London…which is why people keep coming back to it, again and again, at the edge of the world.

Though not an evil villain, MONA’s owner is indeed an eccentric millionaire — professional gambler David Walsh — and his is no ordinary private art collection. Walsh’s oft-repeated vision for MONA, which opened in 2011, is a “subversive adult Disneyland,” and it’s clear from the moment you set foot inside that he isn’t interested in making viewing art any more pleasant than riding in a teacup. Built into the rock face, the subterranean museum and its disorienting, mazelike galleries play with sensory perception, overstimulation, and claustrophobia. Fender Katsalidis’s design blithely eschews all concepts of a traditional art institution — the endless white walls, the programmed circulation strategy — an immediate harbinger that you’re in for something unorthodox.

And then there are the artworks, which, reflecting Walsh’s pet themes of sex and death, are equally confrontational. If there’s a boundary to be pushed, MONA pushes it, gleefully. Victoria-based sculptor Greg Taylor’s My Beautiful Chair, for example, simulates the process of euthanasia; nearby, another of his installations features a wall of ceramic vulvas (chocolate versions of which are available in the museum’s gift shop). Belgian Neo-Conceptual artist Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Professional is a large contraption that mimics the human digestive system, complete with excrement.

There are plenty of lighter moments throughout as well, artistic palate cleansers between the more intense works. You could pull up a beanbag to South African artist Candice Breitz’s installation Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) and watch the wall of TVs featuring laypeople singing along passionately, if off-key, to the singer’s Immaculate Collection album. Navigating the dark tunnels and chambers of the museum’s Siloam section, you might happen upon Ai Weiwei’s White House installation — an 860-square-foot frame of a Qing dynasty home — glowing angelically under a skylight. At Mona Confessional, a site-specific work by British visual artist and composer Oliver Beer, you can whisper your deepest secrets into a tube that delivers them to listeners on the other side of the museum. Several installations by the light artist James Turrell include Unseen Seen, a mind-blowing, 45-minute “ride” in an otherworldly orb that hovers over the sun-drenched restaurant, Faro. There’s also an on-site winery, Moorilla, and even a set of luxurious, art-filled villas nearby should your frazzled senses need to spend the night.

As you wander its shadowy depths, wondering when you’ll see daylight again, MONA is at once so immersive and intimate that it’s easy to forget that you’re on a sleepy, lightly populated island at the bottom of the world and not in a bustling metropolis. And that’s part of its irreverence: The global clout of MONA feels like the ultimate revenge for Hobart, long the butt of derisive jokes from its glossier mainland rivals Sydney and Melbourne. With no long-standing reputation as a cultural capital to protect, Tasmania leaned into the “weird” label it had long been saddled with and indulged in its freedom to do whatever the hell it wanted. And now those mainlanders — and art connoisseurs the world over — are flocking to MONA not only for the museum itself, but for its art and music festivals, turning the island state into one of Australia’s most important cultural enclaves. It’s hard not to imagine Walsh sitting somewhere, fingers steepled, reveling in the success of such a cunning coup.

Originally from Tasmania, Mikki Brammer now lives in New York City, where she writes about architecture, art, and design for publications including Architectural Digest, ELLE Décor, and Dwell. Her debut novel, The Collected Regrets of Clover, has been published in 26 languages.