EVERY NORWEGIAN CHILD has stood in cross-country skis at the bottom of a snowy slope and looked up at his or her father. 'So your dad is there at the top of the hill holding a treat and he says, 'Just make it up here, and we'll take a break,' ' says Eivind Furnesvik, the owner and director of Standard (Oslo), the most successful art gallery in the country's up-and-coming scene. 'That is Norway.'
每个挪威孩子都曾踩着滑雪板，站在雪山脚下，望着自己的父亲。Eivind Furnesvik说：“你的父亲站在山顶上，拿着一个小礼物对你说，‘你上到这儿来我们就休息。’”Furnesvik是Standard (Oslo)艺廊的老板以及主管，在整个奥斯陆即将崛起的艺术领域，这家艺廊最为成功。“这就是挪威的行事之道。”
With that same mettle and hope of reward, the players of Oslo's art world have begun a steep climb to join the ranks of global elite art capitals. The treat-bearing father atop the hill is the government, waving vast largesse from the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. But the route isn't easy for those involved: Aside from subzero temperatures and months of darkness, the relatively small capital city of 600,000 was, until very recently, better known for timber exports and dried fish aged in lye than cutting-edge contemporary art.
奥斯陆(Oslo)的艺术家们在这场艰难的艺术攀登中带着勇气去追逐名誉，试图将奥斯陆打造成为全球顶尖的艺术中心之一。拿着奖品站在山顶上的父亲比喻拥有全球最大主权基金的挪威政府。但这条路对于艺术家们来说并不容易：除了零下的温度和长达数月的黑暗，这个仅有60万人的小首都直到最近，享誉世界的都是出口的木材和泡在 液中的鱼干，而不是先锋派当代艺术。
Just over 100 years ago, shortly after Norway gained full independence from Sweden, the regions north of Bergen counted among the poorest in Europe. In the decades since 1969, when Phillips Petroleum discovered vast oil and gas reserves in the North Sea's Ekofisk field, those same regions have become some of the continent's richest. Income from the reserves pours in through the state-controlled energy giant Statoil, and accrues in Norway's $745 billion sovereign wealth fund, the so-called Oljefondet. Norway's 12-year-old sustainability-minded handlingsregelen, or 'spending rule,' stipulates that the government can use only 4 percent of that fund in each year's national budget. Add that to the country's Scandinavian brand of social democracy, and the result is unrivaled government support for the artistic economy. Last October, Hadia Tajik, Norway's Minister of Culture, announced the country's largest-ever budget for the arts.
挪威脱离瑞典，获得独立，仅有一百多年的时间。在此之前，卑尔根(Bergen)以北是欧洲最贫困的地区。1969年，菲利普斯石油公司(Phillips Petroleum)在北海(North Sea)的埃科菲斯克油田(Ekofisk Field)发现了大量的石油和天然气；此后，这一地区变成了欧洲大陆最富庶的地区之一。国家控股的能源巨头挪威国家石油公司(Statoil)通过开采油气田，为挪威主权基金（Oljefondet，又称挪威政府养老基金），累积了7,450亿美元（约合46,190亿人民币）。挪威崇尚可持续发展，已有12年历史的“花费条例”规定，政府每年纳入国家开支的预算只能为基金价值的百分之四。这无疑体现了挪威斯堪的纳维亚式(Scandinavian)的社会民主，而此举的结果就是挪威政府对艺术经济举世无双的支持。去年十月，挪威文化部(Ministry of Culture)部长Hadia Tajik发布了本国历史上最大的艺术基金。
'It's easy to get things done in Oslo,' says singer and performance artist Nils Bech in a downtown café near the affluent shopping district surrounding the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. 'We have a really good support system, so if you get to a certain level in your career it's possible to get funding to do projects that you wouldn't be able to do elsewhere.' Next to him sits his best friend, Ida Ekblad, a painter, sculptor and conceptual artist. 'It's because Oslo's small. In New York, if you want certain kinds of materials, there are so many rules, and it's so difficult to get things done sometimes,' Ekblad says. 'Here, I'm friends with the guy that works at the scrapyard, and he's always happy when I go there.' Ekblad's recent work involves carving lines from poems she wrote into the wheels of shopping carts, coating the wheels in paint and rolling them across canvases. A former break-dancer, she is one of the flag-bearers of Norway's artistic ascendance: Her inclusion in the 'ILLUMInations' exhibition at the 2011 Venice Biennale was a rallying cry for every art student in Oslo. In April, she had a solo show at the National Museum's contemporary art wing, the Museet for Samtidskunst, where artists like Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge and Robert Smithson have also recently been shown. Stipends from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture have facilitated both Bech and Ekblad's work: He has two years of financing, and she has three. 'I must admit I did have an instinct to come back to Norway that I hadn't felt before,' says Ekblad about her recent return home while pregnant with her daughter after years living abroad in Italy.
歌手兼演员尼尔斯・贝克(Nils Bech)在市中心靠近挪威国会(Storting)的一家咖啡馆说：“在奥斯陆做事很容易。我们的后勤体系很棒，所以当你达到某个阶段后，你就可能得到资金来做一些其它地方没法做的项目。”坐在他身旁的画家、雕塑家、概念艺术家及好友艾达・艾克布莱德(Ida Ekblad)说：“这是因为奥斯陆很小。在纽约，如果你想要某种材料，总会有条条框框限制你，所以有时办事非常困难。但在这里，我有朋友在废品堆放场工作，每次我去那里，他都很开心。”艾克布莱德最近的工作是把自己写的诗刻在购物车的轮子上，然后将轮子涂上颜料，再将其滚过帆布。她曾是霹雳舞者，也是挪威艺术圈的旗手：她参加了2011年的威尼斯双年展“ILLUMInation”，而这个展览撩动了奥斯陆每个艺术生的心弦。今年四月，她在国家博物馆(National Museum)的现代美术馆(Museet for Samtidskunst)举行了个人展览。最近像安妮施・卡普尔(Anish Kapoor)，William Kendridge和罗伯特・史密森(Robert Smithson)之类的艺术家也在这里举行了展览。挪威文化部提供的奖金帮助了贝克和艾克布莱德的创作：前者可得到两年资助，后者为三年。艾克布莱德说道：“我必须得说当时我有种回到挪威的冲动，而这种感觉原来从未有过。”她在意大利侨居多年，最近回国的时候已怀有身孕。
Another artist who's recently come home is Marius Engh, a member of Furnesvik's roster at Standard (Oslo), who moved back to Oslo after five years in Berlin. 'Sometimes you need a break from a small place like this,' he says on the phone from the home studio he's been able to rent, thanks to government subsidies-an old astronomical observatory with a view over the fjord. 'By moving back home, you come back into the possibility of renewing yourself or becoming whole,' he says. 'I started skiing again!'
最近回国的艺术家还有马留斯・恩格(Marius Engh)。他是Standard (Oslo)的花名册中的一员。在柏林居住五年后，他回到了奥斯陆。他在租赁的家庭工作室里接电话时说，“有时你需要在如这里一样的小地方放松身心。回到家乡，也给了你重新认识自己或变得更完整的可能。比如，我又开始滑雪了！”他的租金由政府补贴，这个由一座天文台改成的工作室可以鸟瞰峡湾的美景。
Even as the city has held fast to some of its grittier elements-a heroin problem lurks in the shadows-you see emblems of its dedication to art everywhere: architectural coups like the opera house designed by the award-winning Norwegian firm Snøhetta or, nearby, along the waterfront, Renzo Piano Astrup Fearnley contemporary art museum, financed by the private wealth of a shipping family and sponsored by Swedish oil firm Lundin Petroleum . New space for the Munch Museum-currently mired in political debate over its location-is forthcoming, as is a new building for the National Museum, slated to open in 2017 and constructed to hold the institution's classical and contemporary collections.
即便这座城市严格防控着危险因素――比如暗地里存在的海洛因问题――但其对艺术的奉献还是随处可见：由获奖设计公司Snoehetta设计的形状犹如歌剧院的建筑；以及附近的码头边，由一个航运家族企业出资修建，并得到瑞典伦丁石油公司(Lundin Petroleum)赞助的Renzo Piano AstrupFearnley当代艺术馆。虽然政党对新的蒙克博物馆(Munch Museum)的选址议论不休，但其动工也指日可待，作为国家博物馆(National Museum)的一栋新建筑，它将会在2017年拉开帷幕，届时，会成为挪威古典及当代藏品的聚集地。