Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art and the Intertextual Traces of English Romanticism

Displays at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania have been presented and received as an innovative democratizing departure from currently dominant curatorial paradigms. Attention is drawn in this article to multiple material similarities as well as resonances of signified meaning and affect between MONA and four sites of sublimely aestheticized experience/display constructed for socially elite audiences during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as part of English romanticism. Viewed in this light, MONA can be understood to recast visual practices and aesthetic affects whose residual intertextual traces deconstructively qualify the museum’s existing presentation and reception.