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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And they can buy posters. They can buy prints. There's a lot of ways to skin that cat. And MoMA basically was a commercial showplace for people that were tourists to come and look. I remember I had a meeting years ago with the mayor of Rio de Janeiro. A friend of mine asked me to meet with him. And the purpose of the meeting, this is 30 years ago, how do they make Rio a great city?
Yeah. And that was what the lunch was by. I hosted him at my house. He brought like five different associates of his. And I said, look, the thing that defines great cities at the end of the day is is the cultural aspects and the sporting aspects, the places where people gather. So you could have a great city that's beautiful, the architecture's amazing, but there's no cultural ethos in it.
So if you look at the best cities in the world from New York to London to Paris, they are loaded with cultural ethos. initiatives and people can get lost in them. I mean, I don't go to any, to Paris or London without making time to see a half a dozen museums, even if it's just for a short touch and go. So my answer to him was build an art collection and promote a couple of your sports teams.
You have amazing sports stars. And I think that The museum is critical. And in New York, MoMA needed to move to the next level. So we needed a director, and it was a tough assignment because the director has to be intellectually sufficient, a leader, a thought provider, as well as someone who has the ability to see around corners. And it's very tough to do that.
Plus a sense of what the constituency wants to see. And that constituency is not just native New Yorkers, but it's visitors. I mean, the amount of tourists we get is staggering. We take 20,000 people a day through the museum seven days a week. You need like a founder in that role. Exactly right. You need someone with a founder's mentality. We were...
lucky enough to stumble on a man named Glenn Lowry, who had absolutely no contemporary art background. He had a PhD in Islamic art, knew nothing about contemporary art, but was smart, articulate, well-spoken, handled people brilliantly, and had this extraordinary burning desire to learn. And everyone that was debating it was saying, well, he doesn't know anything about art.
You know, well, that's true. But neither did I when I started. And you learn. And we chose Glenn. It was an extraordinary long shot compared to all the other candidates that all had mega museum backgrounds. Turned out to be the greatest thing we ever did. Glenn came in and didn't do anything at the beginning except study. You know, there's a lot of employees there. There's a lot of art there.
We have 35,000 pieces of art just in storage.
We have the greatest reservoir of modern art in the world. In the world. And we needed someone that knew how to display it, could raise money. understood who the new artists were, didn't lean on some of the older postulates of the museum, which was only take established artists into the collection. How do we start a fund for the 21st century, taking young, new artists?
Glenn turned out to be that guy.
He did so many things that were fantastic. First of all, he led by example. There was nothing he asked anyone to do that he wouldn't do himself. Yeah. That's the cardinal rule of being a leader. First person out of the Fox. You want someone to do that? You better be able to do it yourself. And if they don't do it, just go do it.
Secondly, he populated the board with the most diverse, amazing group of men and women, but they had one common denominator. They were all art collectors of something. They collected something. So they had a passion for the arts. There's a huge difference between
between an institution with trustees that are financially responsible or socially responsible, but don't have the passion to collect something. And there is an understanding of The mission of the museum from a collecting standpoint, balanced by a financial standpoint, and also how to show it off. The shows are the best. The trustees are incredibly supportive.
You don't have to ask anybody for anything. It's like a club and everyone gets along, which is really crazy. and supports each other. So it just all works like a Swiss watch.
I love that guy. He is the opposite of me. He is at the same speed 99% of his life. He doesn't let anything bother him. He knows what he's doing. He enjoys his work. There's a zen-like quality around him. And when people say that, you kind of go, oh, nonsense. People say that. But man, he had it.
He had this aura about him of calmness and determination, passionate about what he did, excited about his art, but no emotional swings. Just lived his life, enjoyed his life. We brought him to L.A. for six weeks to paint a 26-foot high mural in the lobby of our building that I am pay design. He was the greatest six weeks of my life.
I sat there and watched, I talked about this on the last podcast, watched this guy create something off a white canvas out of his head. To me, that's the ultimate definition of being creative.
Well, that benchmarking exercise applies not just to artists, but to everything in my life. All the people you mentioned, I identified early as people I wanted to be involved with. When I met Alex Karp 20 years ago, who Peter Thiel introduced me to, he wasn't the Alex Karp he is today. He was highly profiled, incredibly well-spoken, and dogmatically passionate about his point of view.
wasn't that guy. He was just a brilliant guy who had a PhD in philosophy from Germany and frankly looked ill-equipped to run Palander. When Peter asked me to meet with him and I looked at his credits, I called Peter and I said, give me a little color here. You know, now they both spoke German. Peter's from Germany. So they had a common denominator.
But man, Alex sure didn't look like the guy that was going to lead this highly technical, cutting-edge company 20 years ahead of the AI infatuation. But sitting with the guy, it was the same thing as sitting with a young artist. So 30... I'm guessing 30 years ago. I'm not even sure. Larry Gagosian, who, as you know, was my assistant at the William Morris Agency 50 years ago. Forgot about that.
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