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One gallery is lined with bloodred velvet. Elsewhere in the crepuscular light there hides a library, a cinema, various performance spaces, and three levels of galleries, all discrete and different. Beyond the desultory drinkers is mysterious night. Visitors descend by a large spiral staircase or a cylindrical glass elevator at its center, to cavernous deep passageways cut through Triassic sandstone, at the juncture of which there is a bar.

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Tasmanians are admitted to the museum free of charge and everyone else pays an entrance fee. Set on a small peninsula, the four-story complex is almost twice the size of New YorkвЂ™s Guggenheim. But at first sight from the Derwent River-from which most museumgoers approach by ferry from downtown Hobart, the capital- MONA looms above like a post-apocalyptic fortress, waffled-concrete walls intersecting with great trapezoidal battlements clad in rusting steel. Walsh wanted his visitors to ascend to the museum from the water, as the ancient Greeks did to their temples. He is alternately charming, bullying, or silent. He jerks, he scratches, and his pigeon-toed gait is so pronounced that he bobs as he walks. His silver hair is sometimes rocker-length long, sometimes short. At fifty-one, Walsh has the manner of a boy pharaoh and the accent of a working-class Tasmanian who grew up in Glenorchy, one of the poorest suburbs of the poorest state in the Australian federation. вЂњBut I donвЂ™t think itвЂ™s ethical to organize it.вЂќДЄttempting to describe BoltanskiвЂ™s devil is like trying to pick up mercury with a pair of pliers. вЂњIt would be absolutely great if he died in his studio,вЂќ Walsh said when asked by the New York Times about Boltanski. He says that he is constantly anticipating that moment. But IвЂ™m going to try to survive.вЂќ He added, вЂњAnyone who never loses or thinks he never loses must be the Devil.вЂќ In another interview, Boltanski described Walsh as being вЂњfascinated by death.вЂќ вЂњUltimately, he would really like to view my death, live. HeвЂ™s probably right,вЂќ Boltanski told Agence France-Presse in 2009. вЂњHe has assured me that I will die before the eight years is up, because he never loses. But if Boltanski dies within eight years the gambler will have purchased the work at less than its agreed-upon value, and won.

Should Boltanski, who was sixty-five years old, live longer than eight years, Walsh will end up paying more than the work is worth, and will have lost the bet. But the payment was turned into a macabre bet: the agreed fee was to be divided by eight years, and Boltanski was to be paid a monthly stipend, calculated as a proportion of that period, until his death.

Walsh agreed to pay Boltanski for the right to film his studio, outside Paris, twenty-four hours a day, and to transmit the images live to Walsh, in Tasmania. There, other than lurid rumors of a fortune made by gambling, little was known about him. Walsh was a mysterious figure even in his homeland, Tasmania, an island the size of Sri Lanka that lies a hundred and fifty miles south of the Australian mainland. David Walsh first made global headlines in 2009, when he gambled on the life of Christian Boltanski, a French artist whose installations often focus on death.

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