A Scandinavian hotel chain has removed pornography from the hotels and replaced it with contemporary art, according to the Guardian.
Nordic Choice hotels owner by Petter Stordalen decided to take this action after becoming involved with UNICEF and their campaign to help 1.2 million children who are victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation.
"The porn industry contributes to trafficking, so I see it as a natural part of having a social responsibility to send out a clear signal that Nordic Hotels doesn't support or condone this," Stordalen said. "It may sound shocking or unusual, but everyone said that about the ban on smoking.
"We were the first hotel chain in the world to ban smoking and people thought we were crazy," he continued. "Now it's totally normal for public spaces to be smoke-free."
Stordalen is a known philanthropist in Scandinavia, as well as being sixth richest man in Norway, according to Forbes magazine. He is an active environmentalist and art collector, as well.
"Art is important to me, but hotel art has always had a bad reputation - cheap paintings that match the sofas and so on," he said. "I wanted to redefine hotel art to be something unique."
One of the chain's hotels in Oslo, called The Thief, has original artwork in all of the hotel's 121 rooms. Some of the art is from Stordalen's private collection, including a Tracey Emin and a Peter Blake. The rooms also offer interactive televisions with "art on demand" that provide a choice from nine works of contemporary video art, among them a video from 2001 called "Still Life" by Sam Taylor-Wood, which shows a bowl of fruit slowly decomposing.
"No one has asked for their porn back," Siri Loining Kolderup, a hotel employee, said. "Instead, I think they appreciate that we've taken movie-on-demand to the next level, exchanging bad taste porn for high-end contemporary video art.
"We hope and predict porn will not be a part of the next generation of in-room entertainment in any hotel, anywhere," he continued.
Stordalen plans to put the video art in his other hotels, with Copenhagen scheduled to get it next.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
