Over the Bass Strait, lies Australia’s answer to the Tate Modern. Only darker, dirtier and joyously more disconcerting. A unique museum experience, its owner the multi-millionaire and local man David Walsh has decided to share his private collection of art for all to see.

 

Contained within a subterranean bunker, courtesy of Fender Katsalidis (who surely must have been jumping for joy at this commission), this $150 million ‘museum‘ is more a “subversive adult Disneyland”, as Walsh himself likes to call it. Sex, death and defecation are regular features of the collection and all humorously narrated by Walsh himself. He entertains us with his ‘art wank’ through iPhone touch screen technology – the first system in the world designed to replace traditional artwork wall labels.

He has collected many of the most notable names of the moment, Damien Hurst, Erwin Wurm, Chris Ofili, Wim Delvoye… There is no order here, no captions, no themes, just random-ness – if he liked it, he bought it.  And he wrapped it up in a movingly, spectacular building, carved out of a sandstone cliff.