Sławomir Magala, In Art We Trust

Zarządzanie Kulturą, tom 6 (2013), nr 3 / Culture Management, vol. 6 (2013), no. 3

Sławomir Magala (Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University) IN ART WE TRUST Key words: authenticity, legitimacy, aesthetic experience, authorization.

Abstract: The existence of market for art works collected by individuals and public institutions provides clear evidence. People attach value to art. In art we trust. We trust that experiencing art will expose us to higher pleasures of sensory interactions with all-round human beings and stimulate more sophisticated cognitive interpretations shared freely by informed citizens. We trust that both interactions with works of art and interpretations of others and of ourselves triggered by them will advance us beyond the museum (art for art’s sake) and the marketplace (art for the price of it), and the church (art for proximity of transcendental being) and the parliament (art for sale of propaganda).

We expect art to be traded and ideologically abused, but we hope that artistic creativity and captive audiences’ participative attention will enrich all citizens. Trust is thus a precondition for successful management of art markets and public displays. However, trust is often undermined and tested in non-transparent ways. Authentication of a work of art signed by the artist can be denied (Warhol), an original unique object can disappear altogether (Hockney), and the acknowledgment of sustainable creativity can be refused by copyrights and copywrongs (canonization of recycling of lower and used forms and the cult of remix versus intellectual property gate-keepers).

Motto “The mystery of the art market is that some people would rather possess an object of 1 marginal utility than the ultra-usable money they exchange for it.” (Hicker, 2009, 73) “Consumer society is the one in which we believe ourselves to be free subjects precisely at the moment when we have lost all subjective autonomy and have instead become simply those objects that are the instruments of the desires of others.”(Docherty, 2006, xv)

And yet, in art we trust, more than in markets (which let us down in 2008) and politics (which let us down on a daily basis). Does creativity trump power and ownership? Do we trust art more than power and money, because in art creativity exists only to please? Yes, if we reject the myth of a work of art as a unique discovery and start seeing it as a focal spatiotemporal event, a creative invention embedded in relations and interactions. Yes, if we are aware that we build trust to a work of art as a negotiable invention traceable to partly patterned interactions and subjected to changing climates of tastes. Digital telecommunications may drive prices down, compensating with mass fast access, but a standing ovation (or thousands of accesses per site) is a joy forever.

Management of trust: transparency, but a moderate one Trust and transparency – both in the art markets and beyond – are neither substitutes for one another (although individuals may display blind trust or insist on complete transparency) nor are they always complimentary. They may coincide – but there is no iron law of history of the markets or arts, which would force them to do so with the ultimate power of destiny or historical necessity. We value trust, but we are ready to take risks when we don’t have it. We appreciate transparency, but we 1

“Institutions die from loss of funding, not lack of meaning. We die from lack of meaning and of joy” [op. cit.

67].

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Zarządzanie Kulturą, tom 6 (2013), nr 3 / Culture Management, vol. 6 (2013), no. 3 survive without it as well, although we do want to restore it, whenever we can. Democracy is more transparent than monopoly and results in more fairness. If a work of art is compared to a record result in sports, then a discovery of doping may cause the confiscation of a medal, and a discovery of forgery – a drop in price and reputation. German Democratic Republic was cheating before 1989 – for instance by impregnating women just before important competition (pregnant female organism performs better and no chemical substances can be detected). Byelorussia is cheating even today at the Olympic games and world championships (when detected, this cheating causes the cancellation of medals and titles, and it happens to Byelorussian sportsmen all the time). Do artists, collectors and curators also cheat by doping their favorites or doping audiences, with persuasive tricks? Arts are a bit more complex than sports (sport is often classified together with culture in public authorities’ typologies, but falls under different ministry than art or education, and it is much easier to compare how far one has sprung than to compare, say the aesthetic value of a painting by Malevitch to a painting by Braque or an installation by Nieznalska to the installation by Althamer). But neither sports nor arts are viewed as worthy of a minister on a par with the ministers of economics, finance, internal affairs or defense. This slight neglect, a neglected slighting of culture pushed towards the entertainment, leisure, unnecessary addition to serious work and war, has a long tradition. Plato would like us to survive without at least some arts and artists – but we shall never know if we would have survived without them, since poets survived Plato, not the other way round. And managers should remember than Plato barely escaped angry mob, when his friend and tyrant of Syracuse (whom he ill-advised on political matters) was overthrown and killed (not the best recommendation for the rule of the elite, or for the Platonic analysis of the political duties of rulers in a state).

Why did our poets survive? A contemporary manager of culture, who follows the formal education of a manager of cultural institutions (we call it “sustainable cultural entrepreneurship” at the Rotterdam School of Management to stress the need to become less reliable on subsidies and to attract threatened librarians or custodians) knows that cultural institutions have a mission and a strategy. What do we need arts for? To make our lives meaningful. Why does society need art? To help run social games and to enjoy life. Most go to the football game, but a solid minority opts for a museum, and sub-minorities for galleries. Art and aesthetic experience help us to enjoy reflecting upon ourselves as we make our way in the world (to paraphrase Margaret Archer’s studies of individualized sensemaking) as well. They help us to enjoy complexity, simplicity, simplexity and complicity. The quality of our lives would have been lower if we had no drama pieces by Shakespeare or poems by Omar Khayam, no Raphael or El Greco, no Chopin or Bartok, no Bunuel or Tarrantino, no Gombrowicz or Pynchon. Do we need transparence of the art markets to trust art? Either we trust art and transparence of the market is irrelevant, or we don’t and transparence will not help us (most visitors to Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam would firmly refuse to visit Documenta in Kassel or Biennale in Venice, no matter how transparent the procedures of selecting artists to exhibit their works there).

So we do not necessarily have to trust transparence or institutionally safeguard our trust in a transparent way of managing art institutions in order to enjoy art (as a matter of fact both the top Dutch and top Polish contemporary art centers – Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam and Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw were mismanaged by – respectively – an American female and Italian male managers as of 2013).

Trusting Warhol. Checks and balances and negotiated authenticity Do we have to trust art to trade in it transparent ways? We can trade art we do not trust at all, as we do on a large scale. We sell and buy works by Salvadore Dali, of which we know that the artist signed the blank sheets of paper before they were printed. Yet they are sold and so are prints of graphic works of art, which may have been printed well beyond the alleged limited edition numbers. We can print pretty good quality reproductions ourselves, and when 3D printers become a commonplace no sculpture will be sacred. So we can trade art without trusting it, too. None of these answers is a foregone conclusion.

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Zarządzanie Kulturą, tom 6 (2013), nr 3 / Culture Management, vol. 6 (2013), no. 3 Let us begin with the answer to a question “what is an Andy Warhol?” The question has been posed in 2003 although the events of 1965, 1986 and 1969 played a role in obtaining the answer. In 1970, a catalogue raisonné of Andy Warhol’s work had been complied by Rainer Crone. The front cover of this catalogue has been illustrated with “Red Self Portrait”(1965), a silk print chosen by the artist himself, who signed the cover in 1986. The original of the silk print in question (or at least one of the original copies printed in Warhol’s factory, the one chosen for the cover illustration) has been dedicated by the artist to the Zurich art dealer, Bruno Bischofberger. Warhol gave him one of the prints, and wrote on the back of the canvas “To Bruno B. Andy Warhol 1969”. The print ended in a London collection owned by Anthony d’Offay, who had sold it to Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, in 2008 for ₤ 28 mln (the collection was worth ₤ 118 mln at the time). It has been sent for a certificate of authenticity to the Andy Warhol Authentication Board run by the Andy Warhol Foundation in the USA. To everybody’s surprise, the print in question has been returned with a stamp “denied” – and thus returned to Anthony d’Offay (since it did not qualify for a display in a publicly funded Tate Modern). The Authentication Board rejected the claim to authenticity, in spite of the well-known history of the print and in spite of the artist’s obvious endorsement of his own work. The rejection had been justified with the argument that Warhol was not physically present in the factory, when the series of silk prints in question had been printed. Critics commented on this decision: “The task of an authentication board for Warhol’s works is not easy. But decisions like this one about the “Bruno B Self-Portrait” at best raise doubts about this board’s competence and at worst about its integrity. For with assets in the region of $ 500 mln worth of art, the Andy Warhol Foundation funds its charitable activities by selling the works it owns. This has left it open to the accusation that it is in the foundation’s financial interest to control the market in Warhols.” (Dorment, 2009)

Perhaps cynicism, as in “the cynical reason”, creeps in? Perhaps court cases, which are currently bogging the Andy Warhol Foundation, are the first signals that we are about to face the new situation, of which Walter Benjamin’s awareness of the mass of printed copies, was but a slight premonition. Just think about a digital online reproduction by millions of viewers worldwide. Warhol in every iPad or smart phone?

Limited trust, unlimited relations management The title of the present essay clearly refers to the inscription on the US$ bills, where the federal mint declares that the people issuing this currency trust in God. The Slovenian pop music group and avantgarde artistic collective – Leibach – does admit its members believe in God. But as opposed to the US Americans, the Slovenian artists do not trust Him. They are not alone. Less people frequent churches, more people go to museums (or to the shopping malls) on Sundays. Replacing God with Art (or consumption and infotainment) refers to the relational aesthetics and gradual emergence of creative/innovative relations as the new currency of culture. Culture as an evolving reconfigurable and negotiable constellation is IN, rather than culture as a hierarchic construction based on nonnegotiable values (revelation, salvationn) and discoveries (of utopian blueprint) - which is on its way OUT. The Pope can retire, an artistic genius can be down- or upgraded. Art can travel – artists can perform a voyage up or down or both losing or gaining a public reputation and a certain pricing.

Their travels in public memory and awareness may resemble Dante’s voyage through the triple worlds of hell, purgatory and heaven. Dante’s Christian ontology had been taken over by Marx: hell for the capitalists, purgatory for professionals (dubbed intelligentsia by the communists) and heaven for workers and peasants. But even revolutions evolve. The culture of hyper-connected society of increasingly mobile and transformable individuals does not have fixed hierarchies and authorized justifications (even autobiographies, like the one by Julien Assange, are printed and advertised as unauthorized). Our culture prompts us to worship creative, innovative emergencies, to cultivate

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Zarządzanie Kulturą, tom 6 (2013), nr 3 / Culture Management, vol. 6 (2013), no. 3 aesthetic experiences for their own sake, to measure open-ended pleasures as we please. Bonard’s reputation fluctuates but seems to be on its way up, the one of Dali declines. Those who experienced performances of Abramovic’s will rejoice at the news that her reputation goes up.

The main thesis of the present paper is that the social value and meaningful function of art in our lives far outgrew the commercial markets and publicly managed display platforms for art.

Looking at simultaneous performative actions of contemporary artistic teams, we notice that “the vanguard of contemporary art tends toward work that is temporal, collaborative, and essentially uncollectible in the traditional manner” (Findlay, 2012, 179). Nevertheless, we still trade works of art, singular paintings, prints, sculptures (but also videos and photographic stills). Yes, but we also trade their reproductions and we also trade many categories of objects, which are granted the status of collectibles (say, old cars, coffee espresso machines, buttons or children’s dolls. There is more trade, there are less intermediaries (eBay in the US, Allegro in Poland, marktplatz in the Netherlands) and art still clings to the elitist promotional strategies (not for everyone, thus for you), but barely so.

Communications evolve – both reinforcing egalitarian tendencies and frustrating them at the same time.

Suppose, for instance, that a museum would like to start collecting, storing, displaying, critically evaluating David Hockney’s iPhone art. This is the type of art, which misses the original in its very origins, so to speak. David Hockney, who has returned to the United Kingdom after a brilliant career in the USA, has always been experimenting with electronic media, for instance when producing photo-collages, when trying his hand at the fax art, or when constructing homemade photocopier and gearing it for unique print runs. But when he discovered the possibility of using an iPhone application called “Brushes” – he had pushed contemporary painting towards a new frontier.

Critics are puzzled: “Brushes… allows the user digitally to smear, or draw, or fingerprint (it’s not entirely clear what the proper verb should be for this novel activity), to create highly sophisticated, fullcolor images directly on the device’s screen, and then to archive or to send them by e-mail.

Essentially, the Brushes application gives the user a full-color spectrum, from which he can choose a specific color. He can then modify that color’s hue along a range from darker to lighter and go on to fill the entire backdrop of the screen in that color, or else fashion subsequent brushstrokes, variously narrower or thicker, and more or less transparent, according to need, his finger across the screen, progressively layering the emerging image with as many such daubs as he desires.

Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending our four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes that friends pass them along through the digital ether). These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image” (Wechsler, 2009).

So if we trust that we are dealing with an original of Hockney’s iPhone art work, we have to keep in mind that the original digital screen appearance (which we are witnessing on a screen next to us) is the sole, albeit multiple – original. Can we trust it? Should we ask for the pedigree of a GPS localization and confirmation of the artist’s presence in a place, from which the first digital images had been broadcasted? How can authenticity of the iPhone art be secured, checked, confirmed and established? Trust does matter, after all. Especially when tampering with digital art can turn out to be easier than with the oil paintings on unique material surfaces. However, the hidden message of the Warhol authentification case and of Hocken’s iPhone paintings goes beyond the questioning of a totem-like material identity of a unique art object. It evokes relational and interactive construction of aesthetic experience intertwined with the political (influencing and persuading), the social (status managing and in/excluding), the cultural (preference forming and checking) ones. It refers to the concept of trust (in art, in money or in celebrity’s fame) - as a concept embedded in interactions and patterned relationships – or located, as Adrian Margaret Smith Piper has it - “at the atomic,

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Zarządzanie Kulturą, tom 6 (2013), nr 3 / Culture Management, vol. 6 (2013), no. 3 interpersonal level of individual transactions” (cf. after Kester, 2004, 71)2. The concept of trust refers to interpersonal relations. I trust that Hockney and his friends have his iPhone paintings, and that no hacker sends them around with fake Hockneys in order to cash the profits.

An aside on trust [I can also trust myself or God, instead of others, but then the concept of trust is used metaphorically.

In order to trust myself, I have to perform a delicately schizophrenic operation of dividing myself into the trusted and trusting parties. In order to trust God, I have to perform a leap of faith and decide that my trust is guaranteed no matter what events will follow (including those, which might make me distrustful towards God).]

Exegi (virtual) monumentum for (real) communicating individuals Basically, then, “trust is a certain quality of interpersonal relations, my assumed and calculated belief that the others will not fail or betray me” (cf. Tilly, 2005, xii).

In other words: the Andy Warhol Foundation was wrong to deny the authenticity of the silk print because Andy Warhol was not standing next to the press when the print had been produced.

The dedication and the artist’s choice of a cover for his catalogue are more relevant signals of authenticity than a physical proximity to the printing press. Unique non-mediated production spot is not essential. Performance art and participative art do not always require solid material objects nor do they always offer palpable collectibles. On the other hand, friends and collectors of Hockney are right in confirming the authenticity of his iPhone art works, even though in their case there was no distant printing press at work - nor a unique solid surface when the art work had been created.

Hockney did use a new technology and did send addressed creations to some, not other viewers.

Market value of Warhol’s prints can be empirically checked. We can also trace Hockney’s e-mail address book and discover who was and who was not on the list of the receivers of a “primeur”.

Hockney’s iPhone art equivalents can only be compared to the existing works of digitally exposed and sold art. In a sense, musea and libraries, concert halls and cinemas are being replaced with mobile, individual screen-displaying and sound-generating devices. They are replaced only in their purely displaying function, as cementaries where art works are buried and can be resuscitated regularly by visitors, who want to see them exposed. Musea, libraries, concert halls and cinemas are not being replaced in their relational, social space enhancing, functions. Hence the popularity of film festivals, sophisticated, complex and internationally networked exhibitions, of music festivals and competitions.

My kindle replaces a large library built of brick and stone (or steel and concrete) as a separate specialist house for printed books. My eBook substitutes a bag full of books carried along through the airport carousels. I read The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books on my iPad, not on paper. I still like libraries and I still appreciate the palpable qualities of printed paper piled up next to my laptop or iPad. But I also appreciate the lightness, mobility and ease, with which I can access digital clouds and retrieve a movie, a painting, a book, a concert. And among my e-mails I frequently encounter the commercial offers from platforms selling digital art works reasonably priced, sold by one s[edition] or another; for instance works by Bill Viola (brief videos), Wim Wenders (stills from the USA), Mustafa Hulusi, Tracey Emin, Yoko Ono, Damien Hirst, the Chapmans etc.

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“Dear Friend”, writes Piper in a guerilla performance letter addressed to people around her, “I am black. I am sure that you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark.(…) I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.”(ibid.)

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Zarządzanie Kulturą, tom 6 (2013), nr 3 / Culture Management, vol. 6 (2013), no. 3 Individuals of the world, do not unite, negotiate All this makes me reiterate: in art we trust, as testified by the contemporary art world, in which the production (artists paint), consumption (viewers look, listeners listen, participants enter performances) and management (collectors buy, public professionals facilitate3 and educate and entertain) of artistic experience is not totally controlled by intermediaries (critics, historians, theoreticians, teachers, curators, museum directors, gallery owners, collectors and their agents, agencies and associations). Private and corporate collections may not go down the drain of history, but experiencing art may bypass them, as it starts to bypass material libraries. From eBooks to eArtworks? Perhaps. Meanwhile, critics classify auction houses and art dealers into four levels: delta (regional, local), gamma (national), beta (international in reach, but not quite globally dominant) and alpha. The last category, according to the Iain Robertson, includes Sotheby’s and Christie’s (Robertson, 2005, 26). Should we expect their demise after virtual clouds provide aesthetic experience to everyone with a multitasked multimedia device in his or her pocket, hand or lap, without a necessity to own a work of art or even pay a for an entrance ticket to an exhibition? Or will they just transform, change their function and start clustering professionals and citizens for projects, which facilitate making sense of whatever projects artists are involved in future.

Ziarek, Krzysztof, 2004, The Force of Art, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press

Andy Warhol: selected, autographed, personally donated, and yet - authentic or not?

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Recent public discussion around the attempts to reform and change the public art gallery in the center of Poznan is a very interesting case in point. Basically, the main fault line is between those who think that public administration must facilitate and shut up and those who think that public authorities might create competitive market for facilitating services.

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David Hockne’s iPhone painting: “smeared”, saved, e-mailed, gone. Real art or virtual trace of it?

Bi(bl)iographic note The above essay has first been presented at the international conference “Trust and Transparency in the Art Market: Complement or Substitute?” at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London on May 24 th, 2013.

Literature Belting, Hans, 2003, Art History After Modernism, Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press Bourriaud, Nicolas, 2009, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon, le presses du reel, Crimp, Douglas, 1997, On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge, MA & London, The MIT Press Docherty, Thomas, 2006, Aesthetic Democracy, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press Dorment, Richard, 2009, “What is an Andy Warhol?” in: The New York Review of Books, October 22 Findlay, Michael, 2012, The Value of Art, Munich/London,/New York, Prestel Heddon, Deirdre, Klein, Jennie, eds., 2012, Histories and Practices of Live Art, Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave Hickey, Dave, 2009, The Invisible Dragon. Essays on Beauty, Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press Horowitz, Noah, 2011, Art of the Deal. Contemporary Artin Global Financial Market, Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press Kester, Grant H., 2004, Conversation Pieces. Community + Communication in Modern Art, Berkley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press Robertson, Iain, ed., 2005, Understanding International Art Markets and Management, Oxon & New York, Routledge Robertson, Iain, Chong, Derrick, eds., The Art Business, London & New York, Routledge

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Zarządzanie Kulturą, tom 6 (2013), nr 3 / Culture Management, vol. 6 (2013), no. 3 Tilly, Charles, 2005, Trust and Rule, Cambridge & New York, Cambridge University Press Wechsler, Lawrence, 2009, “David Hockne’s iPhone Passion”, The New York Review of Books, October 22

Slawomir J. Magala – professor of cross-cultural management, department of organizational sciences and human resource management at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Involved in global consulting and training experiences in post-communist and precapitalist countries including China, India, Estonia, Kazakhstan and Namibia, he wrote on “Cross Cultural Competence” (Routledge,2005), on values - “Social Life of Values. Cross-Cultural Construction of Realities”, (In: Barry, Hansen, eds., Sage Handbook of New and Emerging Theories in Management and Organization, 2008), the meaning of meaning in organizations and in academic communities (The Management of Meaning in Organizations, Palgrave, 2009) and on „Ethical Control and Cultural Change. In Cultural Dreams Begin Organizational Responsibilities” (Journal of Public Affairs, 10/3, 2010). Interested in visual sociology and multimedia aesthetics, he had translated Susan Sontag into Polish and wrote „Perplexing Images. Relational Identities In Cultural Tempospaces” (In; Lowe, Sid, ed., Managing In Changing Times. A Guide for the Perplexed Manager, Sage, 2010). In 2011 the Polish translation of his 1981 book published under the name Stanislaw Starski “Class Struggle in Classless Poland” (South End Press, Boston) had been re-published in Gdansk by the European Solidarity Center.

He is currently working on knowledge brokers and their professionalization into new education bureaucracies managing the transformed information spaces. As a knowledge broker par excellence he is the editor in chief of Journal of Organizational Change Management, Associate Editor of Qualitative Sociology Review and a founding member of INBAM (International Network of Business and Management – an organization of editors-in-chief of refereed and ranked academic journals), and board member of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Competence and Management (IACCM).

He is married, has two children, and lives in the Netherlands enjoying the relentless aesthetization of everyday life and adventures of itinerary professionals. Occasionally writing on visual arts, fiction and films, he is celebrating creativity in all walks and talks and looks of life, including contemporary art. Creative pursuits into arts prompted him to write on student theatre under the communist rule (Polish Student Theatre as an Element of Counterculture, Warsaw, 1988), on artistic culture between political power and market commercialization (Between Stock Exchange and a Waste Dump. Simmelian Essays, Gdansk, 1999), and on artistic photography (School of Seeing, Wroclaw, 2000). He had also managed to translate into Polish Susan Sontag (On Photography, Warsaw 1986, Krakow 2009, Regarding the Pain of Others, Krakow 2010), George Ritzer (The Macdonaldization of Society, Warsaw 1999), Jacek Bochenski (The Logic of Religion, Warsaw, 1990, 2008) or Alfred N. Whitehead (Science in the Modern World, Warsaw, 1988) as well as fiction by John Barth, Norman Mailer, Samuel Beckett, Fred Hoyle and theatre plays by Edward Bond and David Storey.

Ufamy sztuce Słowa klucze: autentyczność, legalność, doświadczenie estetyczne, autoryzacja.

Streszczenie: istnienie rynku dzieł sztuki gromadzonych przez osoby indywidualne i instytucje publiczne jest wyraźnym dowodem na to, że ludzie nadają sztuce wartość. W sztuce pokładamy ufność. Wierzymy, że doświadczanie sztuki pozwoli nam doznawać większych przyjemności ze zmysłowych interakcjiz wszechstronnie utalentowanymi ludźmi oraz pobudzi wykształconych obywateli do otwartego dzielenia się bardziej wyrafinowanymi interpretacjami poznawczymi.

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Zarządzanie Kulturą, tom 6 (2013), nr 3 / Culture Management, vol. 6 (2013), no. 3 Wierzymy, że interakcja z dziełami sztuki i ich interpretacja przez innych oraz nasza interpretacja, która została oparta na tych opiniach sprawi, że dostrzeżemy sztukę poza muzeum (sztuka dla sztuki), rynkiem zbytu (sztuka dla jej ceny), kościołem (sztuka dla zbliżenia z podmiotami transcendentalnymi) i polityką (sztuka dla propagandy). Spodziewamy się, że sztuka będzie przedmiotem handlu, ale mamy nadzieję, że kreatywność artystyczna oraz uwaga przypadkowej publiki wzbogacą wszystkich obywateli. Zaufanie jest więc warunkiem koniecznym dla skutecznego zarządzania rynkami sztuki i publicznymi wystawami. Jest ono jednak często zaniedbywane i testowane w mało klarowny sposób. Uwierzytelnienie dzieła sztuki podpisanego przez artystę może zostać odrzucone (Warhol), unikatowy obiekt może całkowicie zniknąć (Hockney) oraz potwierdzenie trwałej kreatywności może zostać odrzucone przez prawa autorskie i łamanie tych praw (przyzwalanie na ponowne wykorzystanie gorszych i wcześniej używanych form kontra strażnicy własności intelektualnej).

Sławomir Jan Magala jest profesorem zarządzania międzykulturowego w Rotterdam School of Management Uniwersytetu Erazma w Rotterdamie. Zajmował się konsultacjami oraz programami nauczania i treningu kadry kierowniczej w krajach post-komunistycznych jak Chiny, Estonia, Kazachstan czy Polska, albo dynamicznie rozwijających gospodarkę rynkową, jak Indie, Namibia albo Egipt. Napisał książki “Cross-Cultural Competence”(Routledge, Oxford & Nowy Jork, 2005, polskie wydanie “Kompetencje międzykulturowe”, Wolters Kluwer Polska, Warszawa, 2011), “The Management of Meaning in Organizations”( Zarządzanie znaczeniami w organizacjach, Palgrave, Palgrave, Basingstoke & Nowy Jork, 2009), a takze wiele rozdziałów w pracach zbiorowych, na przykład “Społeczne życie wartości. Międzykulturowe konstrukcje rzeczywistości” (Barry, Hansen, red., Sage Handbook of New and Emerging Theories in Management and Organization, Sage, Thousand Oaks & Londyn, 2008), “Niepokojące obrazy. Tożsamości relacyjne w kulturalnych czasoprzestrzeniach”(Lowe, red., Managing in Changing Times. A Guide for the Perplexed Manager, Sage, Thousand Oaks & Londyn, 2010) czy “Zmiana kulturalna. Zlożoność i różnorodność w czasoprzestrzeniach instytucji” (Boje, Burns, Hassard, red., The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change, Routledge, Oxford i Nowy Jork, 2012). W roku 2011 Europejskie Centrum Solidarności w Gdańsku wydało polski przekład “Walki klas w bezklasowej Polsce” (pierwodruk ukazał się pod pseudonimem Stanisław Starski w bostońskim wydawnictwie South End Press w lutym 1982 roku).

Obecnie zajmuje się „brokerami” wiedzy oraz ich profesjonalizacją. Sam też jest brokerem wiedzy akademickiej par excellence, na co wskazuje fakt, że od lat jest redaktorem naczelnym dwumiesięcznika Journal of Organizational Change Management wydawanego przez Emerald, jest wiceredaktorem pisma Qualitative Sociology Review wydawanego w Łodzi oraz członkiem założycielem międzynarodowej organizacji skupiającej redaktorów naczelnych renomowanych czasopism naukowych INBAM (International Network of Business and Management), jak też członkiem założycielem międzynarodowego towarzystwa kompetencji międzykulturowych i zarządzania (IACCM – International Association for Cross-Cultural Competence and Management).

Jest żonaty, ma dwoje dzieci, mieszka w Holandii obserwując z zaciekawieniem nieustanną estetyzację życia codziennego, a od czasu do czasu pisuje na temat literatury albo sztuki, zwłaszcza plastyki, fotografii albo filmu. Zainteresowania estetyczne podsunęły mu pomysł podsumownaia przeżyć z teatrami studenckimi PRL-u książką “Polski teatr studencki jako element kontrkultury” (Warszawa, 1988), a zmiany w kulturze pod odzyskaniu niepodległości popdszepnęły zbiór esejów “Między giełdą a śmietnikiem. Eseje Simmlowskie” (Gdańsk, 1999). Przełożył na polski prace Susan Sontag (“O fotografii”, Warszawa, 1986, Kraków, 2009 oraz “Widok cudzego cierpienia”, Kraków, 2010), Jacka Bochenskiego (”Logika religii”, Warszawa, 1990, 2008), Alfreda N. Whiteheada (Nauka w świecie współczesnym, Warszawa, 1988) i George’a Ritzera (Makdonaldyzacja społeczeństwa, Warszawa, 1999). Ponadto tłumaczył na polski prozę Johna Bartha, Normana Mailera, Samuela Becketta i Freda Hoyle’a, a także sztuki teatralne Edwarda Bonda i Davida Storeya.

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