The fourth Festival of Music and Art under the banner of the Museum of Old and New Art opens in Hobart, Tasmania tonight (13/1). Like the Museum itself which operates as the personal franchise of millionaire owner David Walsh, this festival is shaped by the personality of its curator, Brian Ritchie – legendary bass player in punk band, The Violent Femmes.<!--break--> While Walsh is a local boy, Ritchie was born in Wisconsin 51 years ago – though he's re-settled on the Apple Isle.

In fact the only links between MONA FOMA and other Australian summer festivals are the touring P J Harvey, Mercury Prize-winning songstress from the UK, and Hanggai – who surely would have been here anyway given their reputation as China's only punk throat-singing band.

All else is there primarily to delight Messers Ritchie and Walsh – especially, no doubt, the concert in which Ritchie improvises on his second instrument, the Japanese shakuhachi with Italian gong-master, Andrea Centazzo in the local cathedral. The Dresden Dolls, punk cabaret artists will surely come close behind.

And, talking of behinds, the Walsh tendency towards the removing of clothes – he is photographed naked, looking mildly surprised for the catalogue of MONA's opening show, Monanisms by no less a snapper than Andres Serrano – is reflected in unclothed group tours of his Museum lead by nude artist Stuart Ringholt. The scheduled two have become three as a result of demand.

Then the innovative local IHOS opera company (they like capitals in Hobart!) offers a newly commissioned Con Koukias work, The Barbarians, based on the Cavafy poem that describes all the dressing-up required to impress the imminent barbarians, promising nudity. And images for Aviary, a dance work by Ballet Lab using Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux – which the composer researched in Australia – suggesting that little apart from feathers will be worn. Fortunately, the father of musique concrete, Pierre Henry, pupil of Messiaen, is offering the World Premier of his life's work from insemination via gestation to creation, streamed live and clothed from Paris.

Visually, while MONA's Wim Delvoye solo show continues, sound and vision are combined in the art of Susan Philipsz and Ryoji Ikeda. The 2010 Turner Prize-winning Brit is presenting a a new work based on her singing a miserable 17^th Century Scottish ballad of sororicide, The Two Sisters – thus 'impregnating the public space with her recording'. Ikeda, on the other hand, turns sound into multi-substance data and records that visually – 'making visible the sounds that saturate our world' – in unpredictable abstractions.

Then there's a bit of John Cage – 20 years after his death – a lot of David Chesworth, Melbourne-based composer/performer – and can any festival call itself that without Icelandic musos? Amiina will be there until the end. MONA FOMA closes 22 January after an intense week.