JB: Oh yes, they always have, but that doesn’t hurt. If there were more academic studies of this field, it would be better understood. I’m here to show a platform of 200 artists, and wherever they’re from geographically, whatever their complicated life stories, each becomes representative of another 1000 artists all around the world. SD: The Museum of Everything started as a temporary exhibition in a former recording studio in London, in 2009. You’ve said that the 30 rooms at Mona are set up like a posh house gone to seed. How many places has it been seen? JB: I’ve lost count. We’ve done, like, a dozen exhibitions. The show at Mona is certainly the most coherent evolution. We’ve really tried to create something that tells a more specific narrative. I like the idea of created worlds. SD: You and Mona founder David Walsh both have art collections based on individual idiosyncratic taste, so do you have a simpatico relationship? JB: Absolutely. David sometimes looks at some of the work and cocks his head like a spaniel that’s not sure what’s coming for lunch, but at the same time, he’s been very embracing. We’re both humanists, and we’re both interested in bums on seats. Neither of us are interested in the sort of art bullshit of making the kind of show that five people see and 10 people understand the jargon on the walls. I’m not interested in jargon. I’m interested in language. Each artist has a language. It’s like walking into an old museum that exists here in the middle of Mona. The contrast and conflict is huge. We start with notions of time and dimension, then move into the spirit world, to belief and identity, then lust, and desire and damnation, all inter-connected, and then youth, and the outer-cosmos and utopic architecture. It’s 30 exhibitions and the challenge is to make it cohere. SD: There are dado walls, some with wallpaper, and chairs in most rooms. Whose house are we in? JB: Well, first of all we’re in my old house, which was a terrace in Primrose Hill in London, in which I discovered I could actually hang things on the ceiling. That was my first experience of trying to arrange and organise material, which was a million di!erent colours, and all conflicting. I’m inspired by other museums. I also work closely with a movie set designer called Eve Stewart. My initial idea was to take over the whole of Mona, and then we all agreed that this was a little over-ambitious. It’s Adrian Spinks, the Mona designer’s fault. We had a month to put this together, and I said to Adrian, “How high are these ceilings?” And he said, “Three metres.” And I said, “That’s about the height of a posh house.” So that’s how we started. It was an ensemble e!ort. SD: In room two, I had a smile on my face seeing Julia Krause-Harder’s five dinosaurs, one made of cassette tapes and cases. Is this saying, ‘In the beginning, there were dinosaurs? JB: Absolutely. Julia’s dinosaurs were made in a studio for learning-disabled artists. Julia has a form of autism. She’s very verbal and can talk widely. I am completely in love with the dinosaur made up of small plastic dinosaurs. It’s an astonishing piece of postmodernism, but she doesn’t describe it as that at all. She says, “Well, these little dinosaurs are anatomically incorrect so I used