It's official. With oil selling at $70 a barrel, Norway is now the richest country in the world. Per capita incomes rose in 2005 to £35,800, passing both Switzerland and the US, and way ahead of Britain (£21,000).
Norway not only has no national debt, it has a $210bn surplus in its State Petroleum Fund (now known as the Government Pension Fund). It is a country that will never be poor. ...
The artist
Name: Vanessa Baird Age: 42
Government grant: £14,000 a year in perpetuity
Child benefit: £240/month
Struggling British artists, look away. Oil-rich Norway gives life-long grants to local artists, worth around £14,000 a year, every year, until the day they retire. Then he, or she, picks up a generous state pension. What's more, the artist is under little or no obligation to produce, install or display their work.
Vanessa Baird, daughter of a Scottish mother and Norwegian father, knows she's lucky; the scheme is only open to selected artists. But for those who don't qualify, Norway still offers an extraordinary array of grants much superior to anything available in Britain.
Her guaranteed income is low by Norwegian standards, but she says: "I can at least enjoy a minimum standard of living."
A single parent, the child benefit for her three children (aged six, four and 18 months) brings in a further £240 a month, though most of that goes straight on kindergarten fees.
A watercolour artist, her studio is housed in her 19th-century four-storey home in a boho part of Oslo with more than a whiff of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury community. British visitors might recognise shades of Paula Rego in her work, but she also paints Norwegian landscapes, in which the characters are, ahem, pleasuring themselves in the fjords.
Her home, shared with her artist mother, is strewn with old copies of The Guardian. She's concerned at increasingly vulgar displays of wealth and the country's drift away from Swedish style welfare to Anglo-Saxon capitalism. "There's a lot of new rich with piles of money and they're proud of it. Before the King died, it wasn't the thing to be ostentatious about money, but that's not the case today." The former King, she says, was the archetypal Scandinavian monarch-on-a-bicycle.
But she marries left-wing politics with patriotism and a rejection of the EU. "Norway is a very participatory democracy and we don't want Brussels pushing us around. If we want to kill our whales, we will carry on doing so. No-one's going to tell us what to do."
A Love for Art was a collaborative blog for visual artists, musicians, writers, and social scientists. This blog has evolved into a new blog called BETA, go check it out!
4 comments:
oh, those clever norweigans. i hear oslo is a wonderful, pedestrian friendly city.
It's official. With oil selling at $70 a barrel, Norway is now the richest country in the world. Per capita incomes rose in 2005 to £35,800, passing both Switzerland and the US, and way ahead of Britain (£21,000).
Norway not only has no national debt, it has a $210bn surplus in its State Petroleum Fund (now known as the Government Pension Fund). It is a country that will never be poor.
...
The artist
Name: Vanessa Baird Age: 42
Government grant: £14,000 a year in perpetuity
Child benefit: £240/month
Struggling British artists, look away. Oil-rich Norway gives life-long grants to local artists, worth around £14,000 a year, every year, until the day they retire. Then he, or she, picks up a generous state pension. What's more, the artist is under little or no obligation to produce, install or display their work.
Vanessa Baird, daughter of a Scottish mother and Norwegian father, knows she's lucky; the scheme is only open to selected artists. But for those who don't qualify, Norway still offers an extraordinary array of grants much superior to anything available in Britain.
Her guaranteed income is low by Norwegian standards, but she says: "I can at least enjoy a minimum standard of living."
A single parent, the child benefit for her three children (aged six, four and 18 months) brings in a further £240 a month, though most of that goes straight on kindergarten fees.
A watercolour artist, her studio is housed in her 19th-century four-storey home in a boho part of Oslo with more than a whiff of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury community. British visitors might recognise shades of Paula Rego in her work, but she also paints Norwegian landscapes, in which the characters are, ahem, pleasuring themselves in the fjords.
Her home, shared with her artist mother, is strewn with old copies of The Guardian. She's concerned at increasingly vulgar displays of wealth and the country's drift away from Swedish style welfare to Anglo-Saxon capitalism. "There's a lot of new rich with piles of money and they're proud of it. Before the King died, it wasn't the thing to be ostentatious about money, but that's not the case today." The former King, she says, was the archetypal Scandinavian monarch-on-a-bicycle.
But she marries left-wing politics with patriotism and a rejection of the EU. "Norway is a very participatory democracy and we don't want Brussels pushing us around. If we want to kill our whales, we will carry on doing so. No-one's going to tell us what to do."
My two favourite quotes from the BBC article:
"The storm brought two feet of water and mud into the bank, and that is the last thing you want in a seed bank."
... and ...
"If you design a facility to be used in worst-case scenarios, then you cannot actually have too much dependency on human beings."
lol
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