Hobart gambler David Walsh has turned art collecting and connoisseurship into a game, and lifted the stakes for its art buyer-players not only in Australia but in the whole world.
The opening of Mona, his Museum of Old and New Art, at Moorila in the working class Hobart suburb of Glenorchy last Friday heralded a new round of perceivable competition among collectors Downunder.
This has not been seen since the buying of the Holmes a Courts and Alan Bond on Perth's posh Peppermint Grove in the 1980s, although it has been a prime driver in collecting in Australia whenever it has flourished,
The share-shufflers of the 1980s bought Australian and overseas Impressionist paintings in big gold rococo frames.
Computer gaming tycoon Walsh has paid $1 million for a machine that makes poo.
Many of Australia's rich have taken advantage of the generous tax incentives, such as donations under the Cultural Gifts Program, to fund their passion.
They have effectively created mausoleums for themselves, largely at the taxpayers expense with roomfuls of art in public buildings outside which bag ladies often shiver in the cold and wet.
Walsh by contrast is funding his $100 million plus passion, which will cost $9 million a year to run entirely himself, albeit including loans from his old casino bank busting friend Zeljko Ranogajec.
This has placed a lot of onus on his gambling systems, which weigh up the odds helped by satellite links moments before a race.
Dealers commented on Walsh's unusual propensity not to ask as other buyers do for a discount. He is also decisive. The lack of any accounting under public arts support programs means he does not have to account to bureaucrats.
Walsh has also gone for the jugular of contemporary art buying challenging works that have already been established as iconic.
Several of these were in the ground-breaking Sensations exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997 which was to have been shown in Australia.
Although other reasons were given for its cancellation the presence of Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, which is now part of Walsh's collection and is partly painted with elephant dung, in that show could not have helped.
Funds for new museum purchases may now be slow, given that some de-accessions have been made including John Brack's The Bar to help sustain cash flow.
No admission charges are being made and apart from income from the book shop and sales by his associated nearby vinery and brewery the only income is $150,000 per lodgement an application of a person's ashes.
Asked what would happen to the three storey subterranean project if something happened to him Walsh said in a typically self defacing manner "who cares?"
However, director Mark Fraser, an ex Sotheby's Australia managing director, said he believed Walsh had thought this out and the museum's future was covered in a will.
Walsh already has some Tasmanian company in contemporary collecting in Penny Clive who has turned an old church in Hobart into an art space.
Although seriously collecting antiquities since the early 1990s Walsh is a Johnny-come-lately to contemporary collecting compared with textile maker John Kaldor whose collection is being given to the Art Gallery of NSW where it will go on show next month.
The two events will put contemporary art from Australian and overseas firmly on the map downunder.
Walsh, however, is a self-declared subversive who has turned its appreciation from the academic preserve of a few largely shown in forbidding commercial gallery premises janitored by haughty ladies in black into a game.
Declaring he wants it to be an adult Disneyland, nothing on view is titled and visitors are given an iPod to help them find their way around and with which they can vote for works of art as to whether they love them or hate them.
The votes will be regularly counted, and in what is a kind of reverse people's choice those with the most hate ticks will be retained and the most popular taken down.
The opening of the new "Kaldor" extension to the Art Gallery of NSW and Mona will heighten the traditional competition between collectors in Australia that has helped build collections downunder since the 1840s.
In that decade merchants Thomas Ware Smart and Thomas Mort opened their collections of Australian and overseas art to the public.
This competition revived in the late 19th century when the "Broken-hillionaires", including men from Tasmania's own Mount Lyell, flaunted their collections albeit mostly in London.
Sir George McCulloch and William Knox d'Arcy of the original BHP shafts went for art nouveau, a relative conservative if then new style rather than the Impressionist art contemporaneously creating a sensation across the channel.
For the first time in this competitive tradition, the stakes are being raised in the extreme avant garde.
As always, one industry has surfaced as a major funding contribution to the activity. In Australia it has gone through rag trading and car dealing dominance.
Now, alongside the Ainsworths of poker machine manufacturing fame, Walsh's money comes, as we have said from gambling. The Packer family (casinos) last December appointed David Cook to look after their admittedly more conservative art holdings.
The current mining boom in WA has disappointed in not producing the kind of competition for art that flourished in Perth in the 1980s but it may obliquely be underpinning the flow of funds to Walsh in an operation as convoluted as that exhibit which the major crowd-draw at Mona operates.
The WA mines produce the ore which creates an economic boom in China, much of which ends up as bets on the race track or in the casinos.
The 360 works on show at Mona are only a fraction of the collection so Walsh's part in the Australian art boom of the noughties and his contribution to recent buying activity cannot be fully assessed. However, he is reliably reported to have paid $4.5 million through Melbourne trader Brian Kino for Arthur Boyd's Melbourne Burning.
A rather similar price must have been attached to Sidney Nolan's Dog and Duck Hotel which for many years in the 1970s was the most expensive painting to have been sold in Australia and the same for Brett Whiteley's The Naked Studio.
The rather subdued current market desperately needs rumours like the one which has Walsh paying Lady Mary Nolan $20 million for The Snake and given the cathedral-like appearance this huge multi-panel work has given to Mona and the prices paid by Walsh for other works this price is not beyond belief.
The locally christened "poo machine", Belgian artist's Wim Delvoye's Cloaca Professional although created last year made its appearance in the 1990s in New York and Vienna but the latest version, one of five, is the first that has found a buyer.
Even while the artist has been a far from ready seller, the purchase is sensational.
The machine, which mimics the human digestive process, produces a highly repellent smell as that process comes to its inevitable climax and it drops its load.
Despite being regularly replaced the decaying meat of Jannis Kounellis 1998 Untitled means that face masks could come in handy at certain times of the week and day for yet another exhibit.
The opening may also give a fillip to art in northern Tasmania which appears to be in the kind of culture sleep that might be associated with its principal crop - the opium poppy.
Longstanding bequests of colonial art have still to be unveiled at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston's where major renovations and extensions are underway.
While this will give Australians renewed expose to the 19th century Old Master paintings appear to be missing from this new renaissance in Australian collecting.
(The only readily identifiable showstopper from this period of western art in the collection is a waxed human head from the 16th century.)
The lack of a 17th and 18th century has cast a shadow over taste in Australia. At Mona, however, the ancient world is very visible, antiquities being placed in a sort of abstracted undefinable thematical flow throughout the museum.
Mummified cats and works like the limestone slab from a tomb showing a butchering scene do not look at all out of place alongside works like the cibachrome photograph Morgue (Blood transfusion resulting in aids) by Andres Serrano and the sculpture featuring mutilated bodies Great Deeds against the Dead by Jake and Dino Chapman..
Some of these were bought from the Syrian dealer Fayez Barakat for many years based in Los Angeles affluent Rodeo Drive, who was noted for his dramatic digs and finds including an altar in the museum found on Golan Heights.
When Moorila sported solely an antiquities museum, its web site stated - amusingly for a later generation - that the antiquities had been purchased on principals governing provenance shared with the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
That museum's acquisitions resulted in a scandal and Mona's declaration was taken down. Current provenance requirements have to be higher than the Getty's and Fraser says that they have all been checked out with Australian and overseas museums.
