I went to Dark Mofo and all I got was...

Dark Mofo felt tired, pretentiously pretentious and oppressively Melbournian.

Image: Huw Bradshaw

A beer costs upwards of 10 dollars; you’re hearing the wrong type of metal make one hell of a racket; these people are freaks and you’re smelling smoke from somewhere, like always. Hobart is a beautiful city — it only happens to be under the cruel thumb of David Walsh. 

Outside of Tasmania, Dark Mofo has become increasingly culturally present, as a supposedly counter-cultural music and arts festival: Scary Splendour, Foreboding Bluesfest, the so-called ‘festival Sydney wouldn't allow’ thriving off the low bar Vivid sets. Any soul lucky enough to be visiting Hobart without ever hearing of Dark Mofo or its aforementioned puppet master won’t be able to make it out of the airport without enduring its psychic damage: unrelenting marketing — annoyingly self-aware — stalks you in and out of the island.

One day, I’m going to find the mid-level Don-Draper-wannabe millennial advertising creative who pitched the idea of ‘using swear words’ and strangle them to death.

You walk into a cleared-out building and see some strange machine moving — in, up, outwards — what could this be? You become increasingly aware that this machine is, in fact, having sex with another machine in an alien, grotesque movement that denigrates any sort of actual feeling or idea about sex, art or…anything really. Peek into the next room for a second to see a projected video of the artist giving said machine a handjob. Maybe I just didn’t get it.

Like some sort of hall of shame for artistic crimes, next door you find a series of panels explaining why NFTs are good. The accompanying artwork involves scanning QR codes — what everyone understands by now to be the most boring, tacky, uncreative application of digital art. Future, computerised, phone, scan, virtual, innovation, entrepreneur, tech — just scream these words at the audience and you're suddenly new, you’re cool, your art is ‘digital’.

You stare deep into the strobe and can’t help but feel as if you’ve become intertwined in some new-age MKUltra project run by a hip millennial startup rather than the CIA. These psychological torture techniques are not used to make you do anything as cool as killing the president, instead filling your head with the idle politics of a late-twenties young creative. 

All ways of reaching the MONA Gallery fundamentally misunderstand public transport — it’s meant to be affordable. Let the yuppies get Ubers, I’m not paying 25 dollars for a short boat trip with some plastic animals, and the quasi-ironic ‘posh pit’ (the Ferry’s VIP area) just comes off a little on the nose. 

I’m still clueless as to how Walsh swung so much of Sidney Nolan’s oeuvre. It’s the one and only thing I have to give to MONA — that and the actual structure of the building. Galleries typically try to seem pure, good and too few give the impression that what you’re about to see will be truly bad, truly diabolical. Soon find out that by “bad”, we’re not talking about Murdoch money orgies and nuclear bombs, we’re talking Die Antwoord and white guys with dreads.

One exhibit, a supposed optical illusion, warranted a queue crawling around an entire room. Once I made it into the room I was left feeling punked again. The illusion, transparent to anyone with a 5-year-old’s understanding of reflections, either went completely over my head, or the idea of an infinite pool of oil was lost on someone who spends half their work day standing over a vat of it. If only instead there was some big sign that just the viewer could see, reading  “Ha! Fucking got you, sucker!” — that could have been clever, funny and maybe even slightly interesting.

Brett Whitely, a perfect encapsulation of MONA, champion of making a painting of a woman about his own dick, is prominent throughout the gallery. One presentation of “The Naked Studio” continues the gallery’s central theme of men ogling at women's bodies in the most pretentious way imaginable. 

And phones.

To navigate the gallery, which lacks any sort of identifying labels next to artworks, you must download the MONA app to see the title and creator of each work. Because that’s what people love to do at galleries in this brave new world, look at their phone, fiddle with WiFi, guide their way through a finicky app. At the risk of sounding a little tyrannical, if I had my way, David Walsh would be sitting at The Hague for this one.

Outside, a large tent along the shoreline compels you to write down your deepest fears and place them at the feet of an enormous sculpture of an owl. Walking out of that dark mass sitting on the parliament lawns, I was left still wondering what it was I was meant to write. I wasn’t in Hobart anymore by the time the owl actually incinerated the thousands of pamphlets, and even flying away from the island at 500 kilometres an hour, I remained suspicious it was all just some elaborate data mining scheme. 

Where Dark Mofo felt tired, pretentiously pretentious and oppressively Melbournian, Hobart itself was fresh, beautiful and almost New Zealand-esque in the warmth of its cold. Every venue had a coat room and every pub had a fire or a damn good heater. The locals did their best to suppress the overwhelming rage I imagine they hold towards blow-ins like ourselves around this time every year. 

This festival is great at convincing you there could be more bad art than good in the world. MONA and the exhibits pervading Hobart were plagued by Gen-X losers, sex-obsessed perverts, NFTs and art about masturbation that thinks it isn't. Enjoyed the Fat Car.