Porn Trumped by Art at Super-Sophisticated Oslo hotel

One progressive hotel in Oslo is making a pretty bold statement through entertainment programming choices: opting for high culture over the pleasures of the flesh, it has replaced all its TV porn channels with contemporary art videos.

Billionaire, magnate, philanthropist, art collector, environmental activist and sensitive dream-man Petter Stordalen, the owner of the large Nordic Choice Hotels chain, has dropped the porn-on-demand channels from all 171 of his hotels across five northern European countries. His motivation? Concern about the link between pornography and the hideous child prostitution industry, which he hopes to help UNICEF fight in its anti-exploitation campaign by doing his part via revamped in-hotel programming. Though dropping porn could seem shocking to some, Stordalen has pointed out that Nordic Choice was also the first hotel chain in the world to ban smoking, a ban which is now considered normal in most public spaces.

One of Stordalen's hotels, The Thief, is an 'art hotel', an establishment with its own in-house curator (former director of Norway’s National Museum Sune Nordgren) as well as artworks by Tracey Emin and Peter Blake and special rooms where "art installations signed by supergroup Apparatjik add to your hotel experience" — itself an exciting concept, no? This provides the perfect context for art-video-on-demand in place of the former nookie channels.

Nine pieces of high-end video art are currently on rotation on the rooms' interactive TVs, including Sam Taylor-Wood’s 'Still Life' (2001). In this work, you get to watch a bowl of still-life oil painting-like fruits slowly become festooned with mould and decay (perhaps a winking nod to and comment on porn?). Surely it would be soothing to switch from Miley twerking on the VMAs to a thought-provoking piece of modern art while you relax in Oslo. Apparently guests have responded very favourably to the change.

Via Hyperallergic.