When the Owl of Minerva Returns

Sunday 5 June 2016, 8.00 am
PUNTWG, Amsterdam
When the Owl of Minerva Returns, a breakfast conversation with Frans-Willem Korsten.

If one could interview cars, the majority of them would probably tell of a marvelous life of almost exclusive leisure; of doing nothing. Each little while they would be carressed and washed. They would always be filled. And yes there would be brief periods where they would have to do something: get people from one place (home) to another (work) and back from one place (work) via another (supermarket) to yet another (home). From the perspective of cars, people have a wrong idea of what they are, really. Likewise most works of art lead a life, in general, of non-activity, or so people think. Perhaps it is time to surprise art, then, with our presence and to do so when the owl of Minerva returns to its resting place, at sundawn. The day filled with history (we went to this museum, remember?) lies behind us; we have been looking back on it with the sharp eyes of philosophy. Yet now there are no sharp eyes, they have just closed; the owl goes to sleep. We don’t know as yet what the day will bring. Perhaps we should enjoy art the way we enjoy breakfast. Or perhaps art will ask us a pivotal question as for the day to come. Like: Did we sleep long enough? Perhaps art will ask us to sleep with it, next time, so that we can be together in the flesh, yet unaware of the other’s existence. What do we sense now that the sharp eyes are closed?

~ Frans-Willem Korsten

When the Owl of Minerva Returns is part of Breakfast Show, an exhibition curated by Erica van Loon: https://puntwg.nl/en/breakfast-show

Frans-Willem Korsten holds the endowed chair 'Literature and society' at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, is associate professor at the department Film- en Literary Studies at LUCAS: the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, and at the Willem the Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, specifically the Piet Zwart Institute. Together with Yasco Horsman (University Leiden) and a number of PhD-students he is currently working on the role of literature and art at the limits of the law. He also makes music, with Zimihc, and loves to work with artists whom he came to know in the last years, like Edward Clydesdale Thomson, Sjoerd Westbroek and Katarina Zdjelar.
In 2015 he won the prize of being the best supervisor of PhD theses in the Netherlands.