Post by Grubb.
Crossing a small empty plaza in downtown Bergen, I noticed a weathered stone building with an easel out front that had blown over. It was advertising an art exhibition. I couldn’t resist. Up on the drafty second floor there were some sleeping bags rolled out in the midst of turned over office furniture. At first I thought we had entered a youth hostel by mistake. Then it slowly became clear that we were interacting with an artistic statement, not about the aftermath of a company’s Christmas party, but about “the future”. The culmination of Thilo Funder’s Artistic Research PhD at the Art Academy, University of Bergen, this vision of camping out at work was called “Oceanic Horror or How to Survive the Night in the Haunted Mansion of Absolute Capitalism.” There was nothing oceanic or horrific about what I was looking at, much less how to survive it. I can’t think of any capitalist nation that doesn’t have a social welfare system, so why the soon-to-be Dr. Funder was alerting us to the impending doom of “absolute” capitalism was bewildering. Checking out the used furniture and quickly dated electronics, I figured it didn’t cost Thilo much to put together his PhD vision. Thilo has good capitalistic instincts
