Michael Ovitz
speaker
1,371 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3 Feb
Michael Ovitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Two inches, you don't see anything.
Three, nothing.
Four, maybe you see an appendage of something.
Six, maybe something, a limb, a plant.
Ten?
Oh, there's a face.
Then when it gets to be four feet or three feet by two feet, you see an entire picture in front of your eyes.
And that, to me, is the definition of success, is that our lives are made up of a lot of little dots.
And when they tell the right picture, you hit it.
Thanks.
It was great.
Let's take MoMA because it's right here in town, down the street. And it's... phenomenal institution. I mean, it's a place I've been on the board for 35 years. I go there sometimes to just unwind, believe it or not. There were two places I went to in the last 40 years in New York City to unwind. One was MoMA.
When I had an hour between meetings or even a half hour, I'd fly in there and just sit in one of the galleries and take in the just extraordinary stimuli of creativity and say to myself, you know, what were these people thinking? When did they do this? What influenced them? How did they come up with this idea? Why is it different?
Better than anything else in its genre, which when you look at MoMA, they have the best of the best, which is as an art collector, almost impossible to do. The second place I went was I had a very close friend in New York who I saw talk to three, four times a week named Roy Lichtenstein. And I used to go to his studio, which is where he lived, in Washington in the village.
And I'd walk in, his wife Dorothy would take my cell phone, and Roy would let me sit there and watch him paint. And we'd talk. And I wasn't allowed to do business. And it gave me a great sense of grounding, frankly. At MoMA, I was very lucky enough to be asked by David Rockefeller at a very young age to get involved in the museum.
If you ask me why David did this, my guess is he wanted someone from the West Coast. He wanted someone that was involved in the media business, and he wanted to bring the mean age of the trustees down a bit and have someone with a culturally contemporary background
point of view that wasn't necessarily just fine art, but I was in a rather unique position in that I not only represented most of the major working directors in the business, filmmakers who made art, but a different kind, but I was an avid, rabid art collector. So it was a twofer, I think, for David. It was the best thing I ever did. And I was fortunate enough
to be asked to be on the recruit committee for the new director. And this has got to be, this is over 30 years ago. And MoMA was always amazing, back to the days of Blanchette Rockefeller and all the wonderful women in New York that put the early collection together. As a matter of fact, there's a phenomenal book out right now that tells not just the history of MoMA, but explains—
how European art was rejected in the United States and never made it here till the 40s. And remember, in the 1906, 7, 8, 9, 10, some of Picasso, Braque, Clay, some of the greatest work being done was done in that time frame, completely rejected by the United States. Crazy. And at MoMA, they started collecting at Adelaide. So MoMA always has been on the cutting edge.
But at the time when we were doing the recruit, we needed someone that could make a dynamic turn in the museum. Because the one thing about an art museum is at the end of the day, It's entertainment for different stratas of social culture. It's not just the elite that look at art or can afford art. There are many people that aren't in that financial category that love art.
Showing 1141–1160 of 1,371 · page 58 of 69
← Previous
Next →