An experimental Swedish art project will pay you to do nothing for the rest of your life
An experimental Swedish art project will pay you to do
nothing for the rest of your life
Antonia Noori Farzan, The Washington Post Published 9:51
am EST, Thursday, March 7, 2019
One lucky (or bored) employee will punch in and punch out
every day at the Korsvägen train station in Sweden. Other than that, they're
free to do whatever they want.
Imagine: For the rest of your life, you are assigned no
tasks at work. You can watch movies, read books, work on creative projects or
just sleep. In fact, the only thing that you have to do is clock in and out
every day. Since the position is permanent, you'll never need to worry about
getting another job again.
Starting in 2026, this will be one lucky (or extremely
bored) worker's everyday reality, thanks to a government-funded conceptual art
project in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The employee in question will report to Korsvägen, a
train station under construction in the city, and will receive a salary of
about $2,320 a month in U.S. dollars, plus annual wage increases, vacation time
off and a pension for retirement. While the artists behind the project won't be
taking applications until 2025, when the station will be closer to opening, a
draft of the help-wanted ad is already available online, as Atlas Obscura
reported on Monday.
The job's requirements couldn't be more simple: An
employee shows up to the train station each morning and punches the time clock.
That, in turn, illuminates an extra bank of fluorescent lights over the
platform, letting travelers and commuters know that the otherwise functionless
employee is on the job. At the end of the day, the worker returns to clock out,
and the lights go off. In between, they can do whatever they want, aside from
work at another paying job. They're not even obligated to stay at the station
all day long. They can quit or retire and be replaced by another worker anytime
they want; otherwise, their employment is guaranteed for life. No specific
qualifications are needed, and the artists overseeing the project assured Atlas
Obscura that anyone in the world could apply.
"The position holds no duties or responsibilities,
other than that it should be carried out at Korsvägen," the job
description states. "Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the
work."
Titled "Eternal Employment," the project is
both a social experiment and a serious political statement. In early 2017,
Public Art Agency Sweden and the Swedish Transport Administration announced an
international competition for artists interested in contributing to the new
station's design. The winner would get 7 million Swedish krona, the equivalent
of around $750,000. Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby, a pair of Swedish artists
whose previous work was inspired by offshore banking, entered and suggested
eschewing the typical murals and sculptures that adorn most transit hubs.
Instead, they wrote, they would use the prize money to
pay one worker's salary and give them absolutely nothing to do all day.
"In the face of mass automation and artificial
intelligence, the impending threat/promise is that we will all become
productively superfluous," their proposal said. "We will all be
'employed at Korsvägen,' as it were."
The pair also cited French economist Thomas Piketty's
theory that accumulated wealth has typically grown at a rate that outpaces
increases in workers' wages. The result, Piketty argues, is an ever-widening
gap between the extremely rich and everyone else. Using that same calculation,
Goldin and Senneby predicted that by creating a foundation to prevent the prize
money from being taxed, then investing it in the market, they would be able to
keep paying that employee's salary for "eternity" - which they defined
as 120 years.
A 2017 financial analysis conducted by Sweden's Erik
Penser Bank, which the artists submitted as part of their application,
concurred. The artists had proposed paying the worker 21,600 Swedish krona a
month, the equivalent of roughly $2,312, or $27,744 a year. Factoring in annual
salary increases of 3.2 percent, consistent with what Sweden's public sector
employees receive, the bankers concluded that there was a 75 percent chance
that the prize money would earn enough interest from being invested in an
equity fund to last for 120 years or more.
"In this sense the artwork can function as a measure
of our growing inequality," Goldin and Senneby wrote.
Deeming the idea to be humorous, innovative and "an
artistic expression of great quality," the jury that had been convened to
judge the competition decided to award them the prize. There was an
"uproar" in Sweden in October when officials announced that Goldin
and Senneby's proposal had won, Brian Kuan Wood, a board member for the Eternal
Employment foundation, wrote in the art journal e-flux, with outrage coming
from politicians on all sides.
"Old Social Democrats accused them of using
financial realism to mock the transcendental accomplishments of the welfare
state," he recalled. "Neoliberal 'progressives' accused them of
wasting taxpayers' money to stage a nostalgic return to that same welfare
state." Lars Hjälmered, a member of parliament from Gothenburg who belongs
to Sweden's center-right Moderate Party, decried the conceptual artwork as
"stupidity" in the news magazine Dagens Samhälle.
In their own writing, Goldin and Senneby fully
acknowledge that paying someone to show up at a train station twice a day and
punch a time clock is unproductive and thoroughly worthless. That's the idea.
Many people believe that art is supposed to be useless, they point out. They
also suggest that the pointless job could lead to the creation of a new idiom
expressing apathy, indolence and boredom: You're working "as though you
were at Korsvägen."
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