Reports confirm that David Walsh has made a most curious purchase for his Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), scheduled to open at Walsh's Moorilla Estate outside Hobart in 2011.  He has acquired the 'remaining' life work of 65 year old French artist Christian Boltanski. 

From January1st 2010 until the artist dies, the artist is being filmed 24 hours a day at his French studio and images are being transmitted to Walsh's Tasmanian Gallery.  The purchase is a game with death and represents a calculated gamble by Walsh; the longer the artist lives, the more the artwork will cost him.  Says Boltanski "If I die in three years, he wins.  If I die in 10 years, he loses."

Boltanski is a highly regarded Parisian born Frenchman who lives with his equally highly regarded wife Annette Messager in Malakoff, France.  Boltanski has just been named France's representative artist at the 2011 Venice Biennale.  His works focus on the problems of death, memory and loss; often seeking to venerate the anonymous and those who have disappeared. 

In the words of the artist "We are all so complicated, and then we die.  We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly, we become nothing but an object, an absolutely disgusting pile of shit.  We pass very quickly from one stage to the next.  It's very bizarre.  It will happen to all of us, and fairly soon too.  We become an object you can handle like a stone, but a stone that was someone".

This is a perfect marriage for Walsh as he has declared that the subject matter of all works to be included in his collection will fit within the themes of Death and Sex.