STATOIL KEEPS REGIONAL headquarters in Fornebu, an office park rising on the outskirts of town that recalls the corporate anomie of Paris's La Défense. In 2007, Statoil merged with the oil and gas division of Norsk Hydro and, in the merger, took over some of that company's art collection. Bjarne Vaaga, an art historian and consultant with the Statoil Art Program, focuses on acquiring works from emerging Norwegian and international artists for the company. 'I think it was very good advice from Edvard Munch: He said, 'Only buy art from living artists,' ' says Vaaga. Indeed, the company seizes every opportunity to showcase its collection: hanging work in its offshore rigs and throughout its office buildings from Houston to Stavanger. A 12,900-square-foot video installation by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist plays on the underside of the Fornebu office's main entryway. Nearby sits a spherical sculpture by Danish-Icelandic artist Ólafur Elíasson. Once construction is complete, Ekblad and Standard (Oslo) artist Gardar Eide Einarsson will also have works on display around the Fornebu campus.

The corporate interests at play and the bureaucracy surrounding the subsidies call into question the realness of the Norwegian art market: Is it really just a bubble of vainglorious ambition? The cynical view, which people voice out of the corner of their mouths, is that artists' stipends are cheaper for the government than unemployment benefits. But many disagree. Over green tea and carrot soup, Marta Kuzma, the American director of Norway's Office for Contemporary Art (OCA), explains how public financing has breathed genuine creative life into the city. 'I think when people are feeling positive in a community and a community is building, it's very creatively free,' she says. 'A community creates a vibe and an impetus to be with one another.'

Before joining OCA eight years ago, Kuzma held a long line of top-tier curatorial posts stretching from Washington, D.C. to Kiev, including curator and agent for the last Documenta art fair in Kassel, Germany. At OCA, her job is to cultivate a unique, internationally heard voice for Norway. The Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Foreign Affairs pooled money to start OCA in 2001, as what Kuzma calls an 'object of curiosity.' One of the organization's aims is to give artists and curators from around the world an incentive to stay longer than 24 hours in Oslo-to make the capital more than just a quaint stopover on the international circuit. In that regard, Norway has catching up to do with the likes of Switzerland, Germany and Austria, Kuzma says. But when austerity means the slashing of cultural funding across Europe, Norway is well positioned to join those countries better known historically for promoting the arts.

For his part, Furnesvik has found it easiest to promote Norwegian artists as a gallerist and businessman working in the private sector. Not unlike the shipping companies that enjoy easy access to the North Sea, Norway is a base of operations for Furnesvik, not a market. He says 75 percent of the work sold at Standard (Oslo) leaves the country. 'The local market has never been the reason the gallery started,' he says. With few exceptions, Standard (Oslo) has launched the careers of the most internationally sought-after living Norwegian artists-Fredrik Vaerslev, Matias Faldbakken and Einarsson-and boosted the international profile of the American artists it represents, like Tauba Auerbach, Alex Hubbard and Josh Smith. According to Furnesvik, for certain artists, like Faldbakken, there's more global demand for the work than the gallery could possibly supply. Last spring, days before Furnesvik's 40th birthday, Standard (Oslo) expanded into a 8,400-square-foot white-cube space.

While artists, gallerists and even the government have begun to voice their artistic ambitions internationally, a serious class of Norwegian art collector has yet to emerge. It's one reason why a gallery of Standard (Oslo)'s caliber has to conduct so much business abroad. Given the country's middle-class ethos of equality, collecting contemporary art isn't an obvious exercise for the young moneyed class. (The oft-quoted Law of Jante, an informal Scandinavian social code coined by the author Aksel Sandemose in 1933, discourages citizens from rising above his or her social station.) 'If you go to New York, the financial industry is the biggest thing,' says Furnesvik. 'Within that, if you are to be considered an educated person, you have to aspire to collect art. It's somehow expected of you, on the same level as wearing a tie. There is none of that in Norway. It's a culture of equality.'

Perhaps it's no surprise that Petter Snare, a rare Norwegian collector, worked in the art world for a time with Furnesvik. Snare acquired his first works in the '90s as a law student in Bergen and later helped launch Standard (Oslo) in 2005 before selling his share two years later and returning to his legal career. In his free time, he runs an art book publisher, Teknisk Industri. Each book he publishes is almost completely financed by the government, according to Snare. He also sits on the board of many public and private art institutions across the country, including the Bergen Kunsthall and the Bildende Kunstneres Hjelpefond, an artists' relief fund dating back to the '40s supported by a 5-percent fee levied on all visual artwork publicly sold in the country.

'Contemporary art as a social marker, at least in Norway, is something new,' Snare says over a glass of beer in the chandeliered lobby of downtown's Hotel Bristol. 'Norwegians are mainly trying to be less flashy. It might be an urban myth, but there are all these stories about shipping people in Norway having huge amounts of money and driving themselves to the airport in a Nissan and being picked up by a Rolls-Royce at London Heathrow.'

If the narrative about somewhat provincial Norwegians going out into the world has, in the last two decades, found its way out of an awkward adolescence, the reverse migration is just beginning. The American gallerist Esperanza Rosales moved to Oslo from Brussels in the fall of 2011 to do something unheard of: launch a commercial gallery as an outsider. She first visited Oslo to attend an event hosted by OCA. During her stay, she met Stian Eide Kluge and Steffen Håndlykken, two Norwegian artists launching a gallery of their own called 1857 in Grønland, an immigrant neighborhood near the train station. The space they chose was a battered log cabin, the erstwhile operating headquarters for the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. The cabin was full of trash, and snow fell through the crumbling roof. 'Something about that kind of spirit,' say Rosales, 'this particular initiative they have to take something that was falling apart and fix it up, really stuck in my mind.'

'Norway, there are things I love about it, but it's very severe,' she says. She's ready with examples of the baffling cost of running a business within the country's economy. 'I once went to the post office to buy an envelope and a five-pack costs 65 U.S. dollars. They have local postage on them already, but still that's a lot.'

In Oslo there's an incredible will to make things happen despite the odds-a community survival instinct, part of the bully attitude it takes to survive so far north. After two months, Rosales was able to negotiate free rent on a warren of lower level rooms below the Grønland Menighetshus, a former congregational hall built in 1913. Her program so far has included work by Ekblad and another Norwegian artist Lars Laumann, as well as by young artists from more established art capitals like Berlin and London. 'I realized there was room for another commercial gallery, or perhaps one that could have a very different profile than Standard,' she says. 'A commercial gallery with the spirit of a project space.' According to her agreement, she'll begin paying rent there when the gallery starts turning a profit. In the meantime she's investigating the possibility of claiming more space in a nearby prison.

Rosales's gallery, called VI, VII, takes its name from the British colloquialism 'at sixes and sevens.' 'It means that someone is at a point of confusion, maybe making a bad choice or they're showing recklessness,' she says. 'The history of this is a little unclear, but some people think it came out of dice-throwing games-when somebody would bet everything they had on the next throw of the dice, and sometimes lose. I liked that it could be read as total stupidity or total courage.'