The Independent reports that art hotels have made their way to Norway:
Art, as in the £1.7m Andy Warhol painting Ladies and Gentlemen, that hangs casually in the restaurant, just beyond the glass-walled wine cellar lined with backlit bottles of Dom Perignon champagne.
Warhol is the biggest name, but the public areas of this hotel carry the work of some of the most important names in contemporary art: Fiona Banner’s pink-lettered, sub-pornographic text of Lawrence of Arabia – The Desert – for example; Tony Cragg’s wryly brutish Subcommittee, a knobbly metal sculpture that weighs the best part of a ton; Niki de Saint Phalle’s sinuous steel-and-polyester sculpture Le Grand Rossignol floats touchably in a plush sitting area – a snip at £560,000, if it were for sale.
These works have been loaned, as part of an ongoing arrangement, by the new Renzo Piano-designed Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, 100m away from the hotel on a spit of land jutting into Oslo fjord. Seventy-five of the hotel’s 119 rooms contain works by lesser-known, but notable artists, bringing the total worth of all the art in the hotel to £3m.
A night with Andy Warhol: Oslo hotel The Thief takes art very seriously indeed (The Independent)
