Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby are Swedish artists who designed this experiment. Calling it ‘Eternal Employment’, they’ve arranged funds of around $650,000 (Rs. 4.5 crores) from the Public Art Agency Sweden. Together with the Swedish Transit Administration, the artists launched the Eternal Employment foundation, reports Jezebel.
The job description is literally magical!
“The position holds no duties or responsibilities, other than that it should be carried out at Korsvägen. Whatever the employee choses to do constitutes the work.”
Well, it turns out that such a fantasy is after all reality, because this new opportunity in Sweden is promising a cool $2,320 a month for doing absolutely nothing.
If you’re curious how and why this became a job in the first place, it’s a bit complicated. Back in 2017, officials put out a call to artists to pitch design ideas for the new train station, with the winning idea getting a $750,000 prize. That’s when a pair of artists proposed this conceptual art piece, entitled “Eternal Employment,” which is meant to be a critique of growing wealth disparities and monotonous work, according to SF Gate.
“In the face of mass automation and artificial intelligence, the impending threat/promise is that we will all become productively superfluous,” reads the proposal. “We will all be ’employed at Korsvägen’, as it were.” They also insist that the piece “not only offers a different understanding of work and the worker, but questions the very notions of growth, productivity and progress which are at the core of modernity.
