David Bowie, Charles Darwin, Margaret Thatcher, they're all names you'll come across at the latest exhibition at mona in Hobart aptly called 'name dropping'. It's the museum's largest show since 2016 and explores the concept of dropping impressive names to look good in the eyes of others.
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00:00What makes an item valuable? Who decides its meaning?
00:06These are the questions posed by the Museum of Old and New Art's latest exhibition, Namedropping.
00:11This exhibition delves into how human beings create status and Namedropping is one of those.
00:17Layer on layer of why human beings imbue things with specialness is one of the big themes of the show.
00:26The show will be Mona's largest exhibition since 2016.
00:29It will feature hundreds of artworks from across the world,
00:32from Shakespeare's first collected folio of plays, a vest made up of scarves which belonged to Margaret Thatcher,
00:38to David Bowie's handwritten lyrics to Starman.
00:42Being able to sort of stand there seeing the hand of Bowie and this sort of wonderful little A4 piece of paper
00:49with some of his scratchings on it, I think it just makes some of these famous songs a little bit more humble and real.
00:57It also includes American hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
01:03The album was recorded in secret over six years and pressed onto a two CD copy, the only one in the world.
01:09It was sold off at auction to digital art collective Pleaser, who has loaned it to Mona for the exhibition.
01:15It's a very important piece of pop culture and it's an incredible work of art.
01:20Only a handful of listeners will be able to check out this album during listening events over the next 10 days.
01:26But unless you are one of the lucky few to grab a ticket, you're going to have to jump to the back of the 5,000 person wait list.
01:33The exhibition will run until April next year.