What times these are for “work”! It’s the title of a song that Rihanna and Drake have made pretty much 2016’s best single, and the partial title of another that Fifth Harmony’s made one of the year’s naughtiest. The entire Beyoncé “Lemonade” experience involves the work of marriage and black womanhood. But no musician’s been more literal about the work he’s doing than Frank Ocean.

“Work” because, late last month, he ended four years of obscurity with maximal creative output: new songs, a glossy 300-page magazine, one plain-old music video, one 45-minute music video-slash-carpentry tutorial, and four superbly art-directed bodegas in four cities. Compliments of Mr. Ocean, the stores gave out the magazine and a CD, whose music was available for download exclusively through Apple and only as a single, 17-track entity formerly known as an album.

The most instructive piece of Mr. Ocean’s data dump is that 45 minutes. Packaged as a curio called “Endless,” it stars assorted Mr. Oceans (three of him) wearing sweats and sweaters, sending planks of wood through a table saw as airy, new, sporadically inviting music inhabits the soundtrack. It celebrates the making of something. By hand. In a sense, he’s just crafting. He’s also crafting mystique.

Were he a different artist, Mr. Ocean might have made a perfunctory appearance at the Video Music Awards on Sunday, if only to say: “Hey — I’ve got this album. Here’s a song from it,” the way Kanye West used his slot for the premiere of a new video. But “Endless” proves that’s not what he’s about. The showmanship of the V.M.A.s seems beside Mr. Ocean’s point. The razzle-dazzle of his peers illuminates his indifference to it. Mr. Ocean is process-obsessed; it’s “Endless” because the work never ends.