But doing will make you richer than dreaming. You’ve got a business to build.

Fiverr.com is an online platform where workers offer ‘gigs’—small jobs to be completed remotely, ranging from design services to long-distance spiritual healing—for a fee of five US dollars or multiples thereof.

This is a gig posted on Fiverr.com by superconductr. It offers the labour of doing nothing for 23 minutes and 2 seconds for a payment of US$ 5. Upon purchase of this gig, video evidence of doing nothing for 23 minutes and 2 seconds will be supplied to the buyer. This duration was calculated by working out net earnings after Fiverr and PayPal fees, and then dividing these by the minimum wage in the place where superconductr is based. The gig also comes with a number of free extras detailed in the ‘About This Gig’ section.

However, Fiverr.com did not seem to appreciate this entrepreneurial initiative. Two days after posting the gig, the following message was received by superconductr.

Through approaching this setback as an opportunity to grow, lessons have been learnt: It appears that Fiverr.com did not appreciate this gig’s status a work of art. Art can take many immaterial forms today, and it can be difficult to disentangle what should count as artistic work from what might simply be a display of intransigent laziness. It was decided that artists need to work harder to reach out to non-art audiences to share knowledge and best practice in order to upskill non-artists’ capacities to celebrate excellence in art-making.

To underscore the weight of this project as artistic work, superconductr decided that it would be commendable to produce content in a medium more traditionally associated with high art. Since superconductr do not have the required skills in-house, it was decided to outsource this aspect of the project to Meisheng Oil Painting Manufacture Co. in Xiamen, China. For a payment of US$ 155 including delivery by DHL (some of whose workers were recently told to accept a pay cut of £2,000 or face redundancy) the following oil painting was manufactured.