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. 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. There, other than lurid rumors of a fortune made by gambling, little was known about him.

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. 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. 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 if Boltanski dies within eight years the gambler will have purchased the work at less than its agreed-upon value, and won.

“He has assured me that I will die before the eight years is up, because he never loses. He’s probably right,” Boltanski told Agence France-Presse in 2009. “I don’t look after myself very well. But I’m going to try to survive.” He added, “Anyone who never loses or thinks he never loses must be the Devil.” In another interview, Boltanski described Walsh as being “fascinated by death.” “Ultimately, he would really like to view my death, live. He says that he is constantly anticipating that moment. He would like to have my last image.”

“It would be absolutely great if he died in his studio,” Walsh said when asked by the New York Times about Boltanski. “But I don’t think it’s ethical to organize it.”

Attempting to describe Boltanski’s devil is like trying to pick up mercury with a pair of pliers. 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. His silver hair is sometimes rocker-length long, sometimes short. Walsh talks in torrents or not at all. He jerks, he scratches, and his pigeon-toed gait is so pronounced that he bobs as he walks. He is alternately charming, bullying, or silent. As he looks away, he laughs.

At the time he was betting on an artist’s life, Walsh had embarked on an even more quixotic project: building a private art museum in Tasmania dedicated to sex and death. The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) opened in January, 2011, and was immediately welcomed by some as a new beginning for museums and derided by others as the end of art.

Walsh wanted his visitors to ascend to the museum from the water, as the ancient Greeks did to their temples. 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. Set on a small peninsula, the four-story complex is almost twice the size of New York’s Guggenheim.

Tasmanians are admitted to the museum free of charge and everyone else pays an entrance fee. 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. Beyond the desultory drinkers is mysterious night. Elsewhere in the crepuscular light there hides a library, a cinema, various performance spaces, and three levels of galleries, all discrete and different. Some of the walls are gilded. One gallery is lined with bloodred velvet. Another room is flooded with water that’s dyed black, which you cross on stepping stones to an island holding two large and identical cabinets, one containing an Egyptian sarcophagus, the other a digital animation of CAT scans which unveils layers of the sarcophagus until it reveals the bones of its mummy.

At this point, MONA begins to feel like a mashup of the lost city of Petra and a late night out in Berlin. Everything about it is disorienting and yet somehow familiar, from the high-tech tropes, the low-culture babble, the black humor about so much that is so serious, the attention to aesthetics in a museum unsure if beauty exists or, if it does, if it matters.

Designed like a Borgesian labyrinth, lit like a night club, MONA, since it opened on a remote island, with a population of five hundred thousand, has attracted more than seven hundred thousand people. Visitors came first from Tasmania, then from Australia, and now, increasingly, from the world—a growing caravan of celebrities, art lovers, aficionados, camp followers, and the curious. In less than two years, MONA has become Tasmania’s foremost tourist attraction and a significant driver of its languishing economy. Lonely Planet listed Hobart as one of the world’s top ten cities to visit in 2013, largely because of MONA.

Walsh is explicit about what his museum is not: it’s not a rich man gratefully giving back to his community. It’s not an attempt at immortality, as he frankly admits that his collection may be deemed worthless in another decade. It is a theatre of strange enchantments: from a wall of a hundred and fifty-one sculptures of women’s vaginas to racks of rotting cow carcasses; a waterfall, the droplets of which form words from the most-Googled headlines of the day; the remains of a suicide bomber cast in chocolate; a grossly fattened red Porsche; a lavatory in which, through a system of mirrors and binoculars, you can view your own anus; X-ray images of rats carrying crucifixes; a library of blank books; cuneiform tablets; and stone blocks from the Hiroshima railway station, which was destroyed in the atom bombing. Its most loathed exhibit is also one of its most popular: Wim Delvoye’s “Cloaca Professional,” a large, reeking machine that replicates the human digestive system, turning food into feces, which it excretes daily.

Walsh calls MONA a secular temple and a subversive adult Disneyland. If some of his early ideas for exhibits—a crematorium and an abattoir that were viewable—remain unrealized, MONA still goes somewhere beyond the frontiers of taste into the badlands of emotion. It has been derided as a museum for the YouTube generation, a new Valley of the Kings, an underground inverted pyramid, an egoseum, the future, the past, an un-museum, and—one feels, hurtfully for Walsh—conventional. Mostly, people have loved it. Gary Tinterow, a former Met curator and now the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, described MONA as “one of the most fascinating and satisfying experiences I have ever had in a museum.” John Kaldor, a member of the International Committee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, said he believes that “MONA has been a watershed in the way that art is understood by the general public.”