Hobart’s Mona Museum unveils new exhibition on status

What makes an item valuable? Who decides its meaning? These are the questions posed by the Museum of Old and New Arts latest exhibition Name Dropping. This exhibition delves into how human beings create status and name dropping is one of those. Layer on layer of why human beings imbue things with specialness is one of the big themes of the show. The show will be Mona's largest exhibition since 2016. It will feature hundreds of artworks from across the world. From Shakespeare's first collected folio of plays, a vest made-up of scarves which belong to Margaret Thatcher, to David Bowie's handwritten lyrics, to Starman being able to sort of stand there seeing the hand of Bowie and and this sort of wonderful little a four piece of paper with some his scratchings on it. I think it just makes some of these famous songs a little bit more humble and real. It also includes American hip hop collective Wu Tang Clan's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. The album was recorded in secret over six years and pressed onto A2 CD copy, the only one in the world. It was sold off at auction to digital art collective Pleaser, who has loaned it to Mona for the exhibition. It's a very important piece of pop culture and it's an incredible work of art. Only a handful of listeners will be able to check out this album during listening events over the next 10 days, but unless you are one of the lucky few to grab a ticket, you're going to have to jump to the back of the 5000 person wait list. The exhibition will run until April next year.