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.

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.

'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.

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!'

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.