The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 6: Jarl Mohn
In this episode, we welcome Jarl Mohn, the LA art collector and philanthropist who founded the E! Entertainment network in his professional life, among other impressive media and business ventures. Mohn became a DJ at a young age, partly in an attempt to escape the realities of life in a state foster home. Success in his professional career led him to the art world - which he initially distrusted as an industry “designed to take advantage of idiots like us”. Mohn talks to us about what changed his mind, and how he ended up building two distinct art collections. An ardent Angeleno, Mohn tells us how LA is the future of art and reveals his secret dream of pulling off a very slow heist involving Walter de Maria’s ‘The Lightning Field’.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!. I’m your host Charlotte Burns and this is the podcast all about imagining different futures.
[Audio of guests]
This episode we have the pleasure of welcoming the art collector and philanthropist, Jarl Mohn—who has one of the most melodious voices we’ve had on the podcast so far which may not surprise American listeners familiar with DJ Lee Masters, a name and career Jarl picked as a young teen, partly he says, in a bid to escape a difficult time in a state foster home. Jarl excelled on the airwaves, leading a wildly interesting and successful career. He helped shape modern media culture first as an exec at MTV and VH1 during their heydays; then when he created E! Entertainment and then, when he came out of retirement to become CEO of NPR. But art wasn’t something on Jarl’s radar initially. In fact, when his wife Pamela suggested buying something, he was against the idea, saying, “The entire art world is designed to take advantage of idiots like us.”
We’ll talk about what changed—Jarl has since built two distinct collections, one focusing on Minimalism, California light and space, and Earth art; and a second supporting younger, emerging artists in Los Angeles. Jarl is an unabashed cheerleader for his adopted hometown of LA and its “gravitational pull of creativity,” as he puts it. A natural team builder in his business life, Jarl hints at a possible collaboration amongst the cultural organizations he supports philanthropically. We talk about all of this and more—including Jarl’s secret dream of pulling off a very slow heist involving Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field.
Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for joining me today on the show, Jarl. Thank you so much. It's a very early morning in Los Angeles, so thank you for being here.
Jarl Mohn: Well, I'm honored to be here. Thank you, Charlotte.
Charlotte Burns: I would say it's the first time we've had a DJ on the show, but it's actually the second because you appeared in our first season in our LA specials. We grabbed you walking around Frieze LA.
Jarl Mohn: That's right. I remember that.
Charlotte Burns: You may be known to many of our listeners under your pseudonym. Do you want to introduce yourself? We have a professional DJ on the show, I feel like we shouldn't waste that opportunity.
Jarl Mohn: Oh, that's so funny. My nom de guerre…
Charlotte Burns: Yep, your nom de guerre.
Jarl Mohn: …was Lee Masters because my name Jarl Mohn is really not optimal for being on the radio. It's hard to say. It's hard to remember. It's hard to spell. And so when I was 13 years old, I created my alter ego Lee Masters, which I used on the air for many years until I actually started going on the board of public companies and then I saw in the proxy statements and SEC filings it said, “Lee Masters also known as Jarl Mohn,” and that didn't look too good. I thought it looked a little shady. So I decided to start using my legal name.
Charlotte Burns: I've been listening as part of the prep for this to Lee Masters and WMB… hang on, can you do it for me? Go on. Do it. Bring us back. Bring us back to those heydays.
Jarl Mohn: Oh, no, that was on WNBC.
Charlotte Burns: WNBC. Yep, WNBC.
Jarl Mohn: WNBC in New York.
Charlotte Burns: It’s so good. I love those radio and you were saying, “It's New York's own Billy Joel.”
[Laughter]
It was great. Do you miss those days? Did you like being a radio DJ?
Jarl Mohn: I loved being a radio DJ but I got, ultimately, tired of it. It wasn't intellectually challenging to me but I had a blast, I had a lot of fun, I had a lot of great life adventures, but no, I don't miss it. I wouldn't go back and do that at all, ever.
Charlotte Burns: I like the emphatic “ever”. It's decisive.
Jarl Mohn: I do love the music. And on my Instagram account, every day I post a different song that I'm intrigued by and a couple of lyrics from it. And it's been a fun way to connect with people.
Charlotte Burns: What do you get the best response to? Because you post a lot of art, you post a lot of music.
Jarl Mohn: It really depends. I'm less concerned with how much response than I am with the quality of the response. And I'll give you an example. During the month of April, which is National Poetry Month, I post a short poem every day. I would get the most beautiful comments and people posting back to me short poems that came to mind for them. So that gets very small in terms of numbers but probably the most engagement. But I post my comments about movies, television shows, a lot of cultural stuff, music. On [Instagram] stories, I post a different song every day with some of the music and lyrics. It's a 15-second thing. I get a lot of responses to that. Music touches a lot of people.
Charlotte Burns: I really like the numbers that you look at here. People listening to this show who are in the art world, they may know you through your association with the Hammer Museum, your support of the Made in LA Biennial, for the Mohn Awards, and your role as an art patron and philanthropist. But you also have had a wildly interesting and successful career in which you've shaped nearly every aspect of modern media culture.
You were a former executive vice president and general manager of MTV and VH1 in the heydays. You created and were the CEO of the E! Entertainment Networks. And that's why I'm chuckling when you talk about numbers because you had such small ratings when you began the E! Network. It barely registered when you started that you would buy [ratings] once a week because you couldn’t even afford to buy…
Jarl Mohn: The ratings. Yeah. We couldn't we were so poor, we could only afford the ratings once a week, not every day.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah. [Laughs]
Jarl Mohn: It was that bad.
Charlotte Burns: But you made your first fortune by selling [E!] and then you started and ran Liberty Digital, which was a pioneer in interactive TV and internet enterprises before selling that. You retired once and then you came out of retirement to become the CEO of NPR in 2014, where you were for just over five years and you helped reverse years of net losses there during your tenure. And Ed Henson, who once hired you at the Rock Station, WLRS said that you had enough money to live on the beach for the rest of your life and for several lives, but that running NPR was a mission for you. And so I wanted to get into this idea of mission because it seems that same sense of purpose that pulled you out of retirement to NPR also pulled you towards arts, philanthropy, this idea of mission, audience, connection, and how you measure that. What metrics you use when you're bridging these ideas of entrepreneurialism and passion?
Jarl Mohn: It makes it sound like I actually put a lot more thought into it than I have which is is not the case.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns: It always does when people lay it out in a couple of paragraphs.
Jarl Mohn: And I could tell the story that way, but it really wouldn't be being honest. A lot of it's just been accidental and my exploration and my involvement in the art world was accidental. It started very, very humbly and very simply. We had walls we wanted to put art [on]. We'd just gotten a new house and I don't think this is that unusual. And my wife said, “We need to get out there and start buying art,” and I said, “I think that's a terrible idea. The entire art world is designed to take advantage of idiots like us.” And one thing led to another and we are where we are I guess.
When it comes to public radio and not-for-profit stuff, in a lot of ways, my wife was responsible for that too. After we had a number of really successful years, she said to me, “We have not been generous. We have not been philanthropic. We have more than we need. We really should be supporting things that we're interested in.” And each of us picked three and we wrote checks and that was it.
And from that led to being invited on the board of some not-for-profits, and then getting much more engaged. Because of my involvement early in my career in radio, I was approached about getting on the board of a new NPR station here in Los Angeles, KPCC—this is many years ago—and ultimately went on the board, became chair, and got deeply immersed in the world of local public radio and that's where I made my contacts with the national organization. And then they approached me about coming out of retirement to be CEO of NPR. So there was no grand scheme or plan. There were just things that were really of interest to me and I pursued them and it worked out.
Charlotte Burns: So this show obviously is a ‘what if.’ And I guess you've been following that thread. What was the, ‘what if’ in your collecting then? The initial was a, “What if we're taken advantage of?” When did that switch into, “What if we're not, what if we can do something with this?”
Jarl Mohn: [Laughs]
I don't know, I don't know when it changed, dear. I think the changes are so slow and so subtle. We don't, I certainly wasn't attuned enough to notice it, but I think my collecting came in three different phases. The first phase was the exploration, and when people ask me—and this happens pretty regularly—about, “How can I begin collecting?” And I had those conversations myself. I had lunch with Dean Valentine. Dean, I knew from the television business. I knew he was an art collector. I asked him to lunch and said, “I want to begin collecting. What do you recommend?” And of course, he had his suggestions. When I talk to people, I tell them, “The taste you have when you begin is not going to be the taste you have in five or 10 years. It's gonna change. You're gonna have a more sophisticated eye. The more time you spend in the galleries, the more time you spend looking at art, getting educated, your taste is gonna change.” And then you're gonna find that you have things in your collection that maybe you're not as excited about anymore. So my first, I don't know, seven-to-10 years were exploring and trying to figure it out. And then I bought one work of art that changed everything. And that was the end of 1999, beginning of 2000, and I bought a John McCracken stainless steel outdoor sculpture, three-sided, highly polished, like that, that funny hoax that went on. And I don’t know if it was in Utah of people thinking it was a McCracken sculpture drop down in the, in the rocks. And I bought that at the time it was Zwirner Wirth on the Upper East Side. I went in, I had never spent anywhere close to that amount of money on a work of art. And I was so stunned by it, that I bought it. It was almost an impulse buy and that changed everything. Once it was installed, I said, “That is what I want to collect.” And then I really got deep into Minimalism, California Light and Space, and Earth art. Those were the kind of the three-stool legs.
Charlotte Burns: So let's go back to that moment. You're on the Upper East Side, you're at Zwirner and Wirth. You see this sculpture, like what happens? It's you spend a significant sum of money on something that blows your mind. Take us back. What happens to you? Why are you so taken with this work?
Jarl Mohn: I don't know the answer. It just stunned me. I thought it was so beautiful. It was mesmerizing me, it was hypnotic and just put some kind of scale around it. Not that we need to use dollar figures as our metric here, but I think I paid, I don't know, $250,000 or something for it. And I think what I'd been buying up to that point, just to give you a sense of relativity here, maybe $25,000 was what I was paying for art. Very small amounts of money, relatively speaking. And I didn't think about it. I didn't think, “I'm gonna think about it and come back.” I just bought it and then I had buyer's remorse. It was like, “What was I thinking? This is not a pack of gum at 7-11. This is a significant, and where am I gonna put it?” And I came very close to making that terrible mistake that some people do—calling the gallery and saying, “I've changed my mind.”
Charlotte Burns: Right.
Jarl Mohn: But I was so embarrassed about doing that. That would be a terrible thing. So I didn't do it. The work got delivered. We got it installed, and it was magical. It was magical. As soon as it was in, I said, “Now I know exactly what I want to collect.” And everything came from that.
Charlotte Burns: So this is the early 2000s. Your collection then, it was this very personal vision. If you think of the art market at that point, this is really taking us into that first period of the art market boom. The art market starts getting into this big brash painting. You were doing something really different. What gave you the courage of your convictions to carry out that personal vision? Which is not always the easiest thing to do as a collector, to understand that what you want to do has value.
Jarl Mohn: And I really didn't to be frank. I didn't know that it had value. I didn't know. I wasn't making a market decision at all. It was a love of the work. I think the only maybe strategic thinking at all, if there was any, and I don't wanna emphasize—that was top of mind for me, in my world of radio and media and television, and the internet stuff I've done, I really believe in positioning and standing for something—that whatever it is you're doing, make sure it's true to what you want to be, and then eliminate everything around it or clear at the periphery and go for it. Stand for something. And so for me as a collector, as I began on this path, I wanted to have a collection that stood for something. And it wasn't just an aggregation of objects and paintings that I liked. I felt if I had a focus and I focused on one area, I would probably have a collection that would be more meaningful to me. And that's how it happened. It didn't really require any courage because I frankly didn't think of it. If you had talked to me then, Charlotte, and said, “This is very courageous of you to do,” I probably would've gotten scared and might not have done it. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns: So you pieced it all together.
Jarl Mohn: Yeah, one at a time. There was no grand strategy other than let's try to get some really beautiful pieces from these different schools. So the collection that we have here is New York East Coast Minimalism, and this California Light and Space Minimalist response.
Charlotte Burns: And you have James Turrell, the renowned Light and Space artist. You have a Skyspace but it's one of the Skyspaces with, as I understand it, the comfiest seats as the Skyspaces go because…
[Laughter]
Jarl Mohn: Because it's a screening room. It, and it began as a screening room. And then I was having a work of art installed and the director at Pace Gallery at the time, Jennifer Kellen was by for the installation and she asked if she could see the space where we were building a screening room so we could run first-run movies that were in theaters. I'm a movie junkie, and when she was looking at the space, she said, “What do you think about having Turrell design it?” And it was one of those ideas—I think the power of a great idea can really be intoxicating. I said that's brilliant because Turrell’s first works were the projection of light, whether they were the holes and papers on the windows of the Hotel Mendota in Venice, California capturing the light that came through from cars going up and down Main Street projections of light shapes in corners. His work was really all about the projection of light initially and so he designed the entire screening room. It is a skyscape, it is a screening room. The one rule, back to what you had mentioned, Charlotte, I said, “I have one request. Every Skyspace I've been in has either had wood benches or stone benches,” and I said, “We're gonna be showing a lot of international films, independent films, documentaries. I can't have my friends sit on something like that.” Can you imagine watching the Killers of the Flower Moon for three hours and 20 minutes on a stone bench? Not gonna happen. So we ended up with these beautiful seats he designed and we had made by a German cinema seating company, but he designed.
Charlotte Burns: We had the artist Cauleen Smith on our LA special, and she said, “You can't make people uncomfortable if they're gonna be experiencing art.” This is one of her fundamental rules. This speaks a lot to your approach to art and creativity as well—this idea of community. But I want to take us back in time and how we got here. You've said that, “It was almost in a weird way escapism that got me into what I'm doing today. Music was really the catalyst and I think escapism, escaping from home and this horrible place that I hated was the genesis of what I got into.” You've had this energy through your life to keep working, to keep moving forward. I'm fascinated by those twin threads through your career of escape and connection through culture constantly, culture and business.
Jarl Mohn: Yeah, I see it. Back then the escapism, I don't know that I do that as much now, I don't know. A good psychotherapist could get us to the answer of that. But what you're referring to was my two sisters and I spent a number of years in a group foster home. My parents were institutionalized. My father was in jail for non-support of the family. He was an alcoholic. He couldn't keep a job. My mother divorced him. She was a very creative type. I think a lot of my interest in art came from her but she had mental health issues and she had what was then called a mental breakdown and was committed to a state mental institution in Pennsylvania. So the courts put my two sisters and I in a group home, and I hated it. It was obviously very institutionalized. It was a terrible thing to go through. I was 11, 12, 13, 14 years old and I had not listened to radio before that but they had a radio in the dorm and I was listening to the top 40 rock and roll radio station in Philadelphia, WIBG, and in New York, WABC and listening to the disc jockeys and the music was a total escape. And so I've always said from that, the beginnings of my career were just, were actually escaping from my reality. And that's how it got started. I don't know that I do that now. I might but I certainly like community and so many of the activities and things I do are about connecting with people and wanting to be with people that I enjoy spending the time with, whether it's my family or whether it's my close friends or the community of art, the community of artists and the community of people that work in the art world here. And so that's important to me, but I don't know that's escapism per se.
Charlotte Burns: You said that your mother was a graphic designer and your father was very passionate about art but, and he talked a lot about art, but never took you to museums.
Jarl Mohn: Never.
Charlotte Burns: Now you support so many institutions. When did you start going yourself?
Jarl Mohn: My father didn't. He would go to museums all the time. I don't recall ever being in a museum with him. My mother would take me to, not necessarily art museums, but I would love the Franklin Institute when I was a kid before I went into the group foster home. But it wasn't an art museum. It was a science museum.
I don't think I started going to art museums regularly until maybe I was in my twenties when I lived in Louisville, Kentucky and I was on the radio there, and I would go to the Speed Museum in Louisville. It was very slow start. I can't tell you. It was one of those things that I immediately felt attracted to.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: When you were a kid, you felt this sense, obviously that music was something you could escape to. I'm curious, when you started feeling the art was for you?
Jarl Mohn: I think music is probably the easiest entry point for everybody. And we start really young listening to music, whether it's pop music, top 40 and as we get a little older, we become a little more sophisticated, started listening to albums and then we get immersed in our television series and our movies, whether they're high art or low art, but they're easy entry. And the more we watch, the more I think sophisticated we can become. Although, we all have our guilty pleasures and there's nothing wrong with that. I think the art world and I'm, what I'm seeing now is there's a real movement. I'm not an expert by any means on the institutions at all but I do think it looks to me like institutions are really doing a much better job of inviting people in. Everything from the wall text that isn't off-putting, that it could be written in plain English so that people understand what they're trying to tell them about the art, the history of the art, the artist, what they're trying to communicate. And the Hammer, one of the reasons I really love partnering with them is—and this year was probably the best example, every year I think they get better and better at it—there was such a democratization of the art this year. I went to that show, I took 12 groups through, and every time I went in—it could be a Tuesday afternoon—the place was packed. And it was all ages and all colors and every stratum of LA society was there. It was a beautiful thing. And as a person that loves art, I love other people having the opportunity to be exposed to it. It was a very inviting show and I'm encouraged that so many museums are thinking about and talking about it that way.
Charlotte Burns: What do you think art does for people? What does it do for you?
Jarl Mohn: To me, I think it's a shortcut to our souls. When I take people through, and this is one of the reasons that I really like museums taking this approach of being very inviting. The reason I took so many different groups through is I would have friends say to me, “I want to go to the show. I want you to take me through it,” and I always told them in advance, “You're gonna see some things. These are newer artists.” This is the thing that's amazing about it to me. When you think about it, there's not one really well-known artist or even moderately known artist in Made in LA. Not one. 139 artists, I think in the show and people are packing the galleries to see artists no one has ever heard of before because the Hammer has created this wonderful experience of what's happening on the streets of Los Angeles right now. And so I tell people, “You're gonna see things that are very unusual.” Some people that don't even like any contemporary art. And I said, “Turn off the left side of your brain. Turn on the right side of your brain. Don't try to intellectualize it. How do you feel about it? What does it mean? What does it bring up? What does it evoke for you?”
I've always found that if I'm struggling with a question, in business or something, I love to go to see art that I don't know, art that I'm not familiar with. It's like a kick in the head and it helps me open my eyes. So I try to ask people to go into it with that as opposed to, “Oh, I like that. I'd like that in my living room.” [Laughs] I want them to look at an assemblage and go, “That is truly weird.” How does it make you feel?
Charlotte Burns: So it's more about creativity for you.
Jarl Mohn: Yeah, I try not to intellectualize it. It's different ways of looking at the world and that's why I love this move to introducing more diverse artists. There were so many Indigenous artists in Made In LA and they have a different experience, they have a different view, and it's expressed through their art. So I get to see things that I've never seen before, and that's really interesting to me. Do I like it all? Of course not. There's some that I love more than others, but I think it's good for all of us to expose ourselves to art and culture that we're not used to.
Charlotte Burns: With your wife, Pamela, you helped start the tastemaking Made in LA Biennial with the Hammer Museum, which began in 2012, and was written about as having overtones of reality TV because the prize is, which is the Mohn Prize, is selected by popular vote. So the finalists are selected by jurors and then people who visit the show can vote on who wins the prize—which is a life-changing amount of money. And it's been a turning point for artists, including Lauren Halsey in 2018, Meleko Mokgosi in 2012. And you initially said you'd do it for five years but in 2023, you established three endowments. One to underwrite the Made In LA exhibition, one to finance the award, and one to help fund the catalogs. And you've said, “We love being part of the LA art community helping establish the careers of emerging artists and helping to honor talented under-recognized artists who've worked for decades and who haven't enjoyed commercial success.” It's a meaningful part of your life at this point. Can you talk about why you decided to focus on artists who are not known and why you wanted to do it in this way?
Jarl Mohn: When we began in 2012, the way you were describing the award is correct. People that went to the show could vote. We had some pushback from the community of artists. The Hammer has an artist council—which I think is smart—so I met with the artist council and we had a very candid, at times, a little heated conversation, but they prevailed in convincing me that we needed to do more. And so we decided that the big Mohn Award, which was the $100,000 unrestricted gift, would be selected by jurors totally, and not from a popular vote. We still had, we call it a public engagement because we don't want it to have the strand of reality TV. We want people to be engaged when we go through the museum and look at the work and to be thinking, what do I like the most? And so we want them to be conscious as of that so that they're much more engaged in the work. And that's a $25,000 gift.
And then we have jurors also selecting an artist who's been making work for decades, but it's never really broken through commercially. These are the under-recognized artists, the, if you, will a legacy award. So that's where it ended up.
How we got there, and how I started the collection, and why I started doing it, there were twofold. First, I love this city. It's an adopted city. I've been here since 1990. We're looking at, what, 34 years. It's got a gravitational pull of creativity. First, the motion picture business moved out here, in the ‘40s, and ‘50s, the creative part. Then ultimately the business came out, television in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. The music industry, ‘70s and ‘80s. We now have, the visual arts. All these incredible art schools here, fashion designers are moving out. And now the gaming—I was very involved in Riot Games and League of Legends which is a monstrous online game. I think it's a hot bit of creativity.
And so I love my Minimalist art collection and my Light and Space, but after a number of years and all the research and trying to learn about it, and who are the second- and the third-tier artists, and how can I put exclamation points in the collection to make it more interesting? I really wanted that sense of discovery and there's this incredible thing going on in LA. Such a vibrant community, not just the artists and the work that they're making—which is incredibly imaginative and new. The galleries are fascinating here and all the institutions are being run by, I think, visionary leaders now. So for me, you mentioned the community earlier, Charlotte. I love being a part of that. It's exciting. It's a lot of fun. And I get to expand my mind a little bit by meeting the artists, talking to them, and trying to support them by buying their work.
Charlotte Burns: So it's a different kind of process for you in essence?
Jarl Mohn: Yeah.
Charlotte Burns: Because what if you can be part of an art scene as it's building up in this moment?
Jarl Mohn: You're talking to a guy that's very biased. You know, I sound like I'm incredibly provincial and it's not to disparage anywhere else at all. I just love what's happening here and not just the big institutions, but, we're supporting LAXART Hamza Walker, who I met as one of the curators for Made in LA when he was at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. He's doing some remarkably innovative things that LAXART. We’re supporting that program. A small initiative called LAND ([Los Angeles] Nomadic Division), which does public art. Laura Hyatt, who came from the Hammer is over there. We do Mohn LAND Grants every year for these brand new young baby artists pre-Made in LA even and for public art. And two of the four we gave grants to last year were in Made in LA this year. And one of them, Jackie Amézquita, won the public engagement award this year, $25,000.
There's just a lot going on and we have a few other things we're working on something with ICA [Institute of Contemporary Art] LA right now. Ann Ellegood, who came from the Hammer, she's a director there. I just think the, not just the art schools, not just the artists, not just the institutions, all the galleries moving to town. There's a lot of energy here and I just love looking at it and playing a small role in it.
Charlotte Burns: What if LA is the future of art? Then what does that look like?
Jarl Mohn: I happen to believe it is, but I also realize I'm not an independent third party looking at it. I think it is the future of art. It is one of the most diverse cities in the country and I think that generates a lot of really interesting new ideas. It is the future in the sense that I think it will set the way, it'll lead the way, but it's not the future in terms of it's going to be the only thing of course. Artists from all over the world have always inspired each other and that is going to continue and I think many people will be looking to the creators and the makers here.
Charlotte Burns: You support a lot of institutions. you support LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum], the Hammer, LAXART, the ICA LA, [J. Paul] Getty [Museum]...
Jarl Mohn: MoCA.
Charlotte Burns: …MoCA. From where you sit, what do you think museums need right now?
Jarl Mohn: Just more support. I think there's great leadership at all of them. All of them are doing really amazing work. I'm always stunned. And I think you mentioned, Pacific Standard Time (PST ART), which I think is a brilliant initiative. It is brought to the city of Los Angeles a real love of collaborating and we are working on a project. I can’t reveal it right now. We hope we can announce it sometime soon—collaborating with a number of institutions. From what I understand from my friends at all these museums, the teams really love working with each other on Pacific Standard Time. They really see themselves as advocates for the city and the area and the community here. I want to encourage more of that and we have an idea that we’re working on that I think will, hopefully, help that.
Charlotte Burns: When you say you have an idea, you mean for PST specifically?
Jarl Mohn: No. I was inspired many years ago when the first Pacific Standard Time was done and that actually gave me the idea to do an award for an emerging LA artist, which I took around to the number of the institutions. Ultimately, Annie Philbin decided she wanted to do a biennial and part of her thinking was that we should work together on this. And of course, she pitched it and I thought that was the right thing to do but no, this is a separate project and hopefully will be a collaboration that gets everybody in the art community excited.
Charlotte Burns: Can you tell us a little more about it? Is there anything to do with your collection?
Jarl Mohn: It's a secret, Charlotte. It's a secret.
Charlotte Burns: Secrets are no fun. No fun on podcasts, Jarl. Can’t have secrets…
Jarl Mohn: If you had given me a couple of shots of tequila, it might be a little more forthcoming, but…
Charlotte Burns: I've heard about you and the tequila, setting fire to your beard. Come on.
[Laughter]
Jarl Mohn: Oh yes, I did. I set fire to myself one time. It was, it was a beautiful thing.
Charlotte Burns: It sounds like it. Can we not embody that spirit now and just share a few little details?
Jarl Mohn: Nah, nah. Can’t.
Charlotte Burns: Directional, directional hints.
Jarl Mohn: I would just say, let's say broadly collaboration with a number of institutions in the city working together to really uplift the community and the community of artists in LA for the artists, for the community.
Charlotte Burns: So that could be exhibitions, that could be projects, that could be funds, could be…
Jarl Mohn: Could be a lot of things, but I ain't saying anything more. Ain’t saying anything more.
Charlotte Burns: We're gonna have to keep working on this, aren't we?
Okay. It sounds great. I love collaboration. And actually, to bear out your suspicion that Los Angeles is perhaps more collaborative, with Julia Halperin, we do the Burns Halperin Report and we see that in the data—we track data across 30-plus museums across America—we see that there is a conversation that is LA specific. We can see that the LA institutions’ figures are all within a few digits of each other. We don't see the same thing in New York. Even though those institutions are very different, we can see in the data that there is a conversation around equity and diversity that is unique to Los Angeles compared to the rest of the country. And it's really interesting.
Jarl Mohn: I did not know that data. My experience has been purely just observational and anecdotal, but I'm glad to hear it’s in the data.
Charlotte Burns: They're all above the national average and even including the encyclopedic institutions.
What if you were running a museum in Los Angeles, what would you do?
Jarl Mohn: [Laughs] First, I don't think anybody should entrust me with that. And I'm very nervous of the question because I really don't know the museum world. I know it as a patron. I know it as somebody that likes to support it in the institutions. But I don't have a background in art history. I don't have the education. I don't know what it takes to run an organization like that. And I'm lucky. I'm very lucky that I live in a city that has so many really terrific leaders in the art world like Michael Govan, Annie Philbin. I think Johanna Burton is doing great things at MoCA. Hamza at LAXART, Anne Ellegood at ICA, Laura Hyatt at LAND. And I'm forgetting a lot of people but it would be not only presumptuous, it would be wrong of me to say what I would do differently. They're all setting the standard for what the museum world should be doing. The only part of it that I would be any good at, based on my experience, is maybe I’d do a little better job marketing. I'm a marketing guy and even that's a kind of a, that's a humble endeavor.
Charlotte Burns: How would you do that? What would you do?
Jarl Mohn: It varies by institution because each institution is doing a different job in any endeavor—and it includes art, music, media—if you're making widgets, you really have to stand for something. And I encourage each of the institutions to really understand what they're doing. They each are doing something very different. I don't think there is a lot of confusion in people's minds about what they do. And I think the crisper and cleaner any of those perceptions are for any institution, that's a good thing.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: You have more experience in journalism than anybody I've ever interviewed and what I wanted to ask you is, what if you were running an art media company now, what would you do? Because there are so few art media companies now.
Jarl Mohn: I know a fair amount about journalism. I've spent time in it. I'm not a journalist, I've just helped run journalistic organizations. But I want to be clear that I'm not a journalist. One of my other not-for-profit activities, I was chairman of the board of the advisors for the Annenberg School at USC. I was on that board for many years and I think chair for eight. So have an academic lens on it too in my time at KPCC and as chair and then of course at NPR. But my role was always being a business person that is helping support the organization, not making any editorial decisions. There's a great firewall between management and journalism as there should be. That said, the most prescriptive thing I would say was the more inviting our journalism would be, the better it is for everybody because we need to get more people interested.
I gave a speech a number of years ago at the College Art Association, which was not well received. My thesis was about storytelling at NPR. One of the reasons NPR I think has done, since its inception over 50 years ago, is this incredible ability to tell very complicated stories in very engaging, simple ways, to bring people in. And I think so much of the art world can be academic and off-putting, everything from wall text to journalism. I hate that. I hate it with a passion. I think people are highly interested in art. Everybody's interested in art if they open a magazine or they go to a museum and they start reading wall text and they see the word “pedagogy”, I think it turns them off.
Charlotte Burns: You've given more than 20 copies of Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being away. What resonates with you so much about that book?
Jarl Mohn: Oh, I hope I don't hurt somebody's career from that. It was really funny. I'm a meditator. In a few weeks, I'll celebrate my 51st anniversary of…
Charlotte Burns: Wow.
Jarl Mohn: …meditation. And it's had an amazing impact on my life, and so many artists have approached me over the years, and asked me about meditation, and have begun meditating.
Rick Rubin is also a meditator. I think he's been meditating since he was 14. I think it's a beautiful book. I've given it to a lot of artists. To give them something to think about. And it's twofold.
Purpose one is to give them the confidence to do what they really want to do and to give them confidence to follow their inner voice and really listen to it. One of the things Rubin says to paraphrase them—and I might have this awful little bit, but I think directionally it's is his message. He said sometimes direction, inspiration, ideas come in whispers. And the only way we can hear those whispers is if we quiet our minds. And he's very much a proponent of don't do it for the market, do it for yourself and I don't know whether that's good business advice. I do think it's very good creative advice. I like that. I think that's a great thing.
I also give people the David Lynch book, Catching the Big Fish[: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity], about meditation and the ability to fish for big ideas, farther down in our consciousness.
Charlotte Burns: You're jump-starting your own writing again. How much do you focus on your own creative output and how much do you see your business career as a creative endeavor and vice versa?
Jarl Mohn: I do think my business career has been creative. I got into the business side of it so that I could have more freedom. I don't like sitting in a conference room. One of the reasons I'm not on any boards anymore is I spent too much time in conference rooms thinking about really wanting to be on my mountain bike in the hills and not there. And I told my friends, “If I'm gonna write you checks anyway, I'm giving you money so you don't need to put me on the board to give you money. I'm gonna give you money. If you really want my opinion, you don't have to pretend like you want it. If you actually want it, call me. We'll go to lunch or we'll talk on the phone and I'm happy to give you my opinion if you really want it.” But I got into the business side of it so I could have more freedom. But my approach has always been from the creative side, whether it was programming radio stations or programming cable networks. When I was at MTV, VH1, or E!, even on venture capital, it was really about the ideas, the people and the ideas, the business part of it, the financial metrics. Although I'm reasonably okay at it, it's not something I particularly enjoy.
Charlotte Burns: When you say you got into it for the freedom, you mean, the money was a way of buying your time?
Jarl Mohn: No, this is gonna sound really juvenile. I've always had a problem with authority, and that goes back to my time at the foster home. I hate people that use power indiscriminately and force people to do things. And I found in my career, I've been lucky in some cases to work with people that I really liked and I've been unfortunate in a few cases to work with people I didn't like. And I found that if I really wanted the freedom, I needed to have a bit more control. And I got into management so I could have more control. But I didn't do it because I really felt the need to be an executive or a manager. There's so much of that I just don't like.
Charlotte Burns: That makes sense.
I was listening to how you created E! and that seems to have come from that place that, an exit that you didn't want had led to a beginning that you hadn't been seeking.
Jarl Mohn: Yeah. No, I was fired from MTV and it was traumatic. I put Andrew “Dice” Clay on the Video Music Awards. We had the highest ratings we'd ever had but the advertisers and the cable operators got very upset. And the guy I was working for used it as an opportunity to push me out the door—which was heartbreaking to me because so much of my identity at the time was wrapped around being at MTV. It was the ‘80s. It was a…you hear my dog in the background? I apologize. He…
Charlotte Burns: Outraged on your behalf.
Jarl Mohn: Yes. Outraged on my behalf. Very protective, he is. It was a very traumatic moment, but it also was an open door for me because, 48 hours after I was fired, HBO called me and they said, would you be interested in moving to LA to create this channel for us? And it gave me my first opportunity to really have serious equity and make some money. So as they say, it all worked out.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: I'm gonna ask you a couple of questions. I think I might know the answer to one of these. What is the, ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning?
Jarl Mohn: This is gonna sound really cornball, but it is true. I love spending my time with interesting people. So what if one of the reasons I love the world of art, I find artists, and so many of the people in the art world that are really, truly passionate about it. Fascinating and interesting people. I like to share the art with people. I do a lot of art tours of the collection at the house. I've met some remarkable people. I've had some amazing friendships that have come from that. What gets me up in the morning is really my relationship with people, whether it's my family, or my close friends and these little communities I have. Whether it's my little mountain biking community, my reading community, my art community. That's what gets me up, people.
Charlotte Burns: I was gonna ask you about the importance of relationships, but from a different angle, which was your rival in El Paso called Jim Phillips…
Jarl Mohn: Yes.
Charlotte Burns: …was constantly outselling you on ads. You want to tell the story?
Jarl Mohn: It's funny that you brought that up. I bought this FM radio station in El Paso, Texas. I moved from New York City to El Paso, Texas when I was 26 years old. I was single. People said you'd go anywhere for a dollar. The interesting surprise was that I actually had more fun and a much richer social life and better friends in El Paso, Texas than I did in New York at the time. I had a ball. We'd close the bars at two o'clock, crawl over the bridge to Juarez and party until the sun came up again. Can't do that today, but we put the station on, this would've been in the early ‘80s. It was at the time of the urban cowboy thing and became the number one station. And I thought, “Okay, now I'll just go around to the advertisers and get the money.” And my competitor who had an AM country station was one of these incredible people. Everywhere I went a retailer, or an advertiser would say, “Oh, Jim Phillips is the godfather of my child. Jim Phillips is my best friend. Jim Phillips was the best man at my wedding, Jim Phillips.” And I was like, “You've got to be kidding me.” And I could not get advertisers even though I was the number-one station in the market at the time, I was having a very hard time getting advertisers. People say, “I just can't, do that against my good friend Jim.” And so ultimately I would say, “Why don't you just give me 10% of your advertising budget, give the rest to him, give me 10%.” And then people started to realize that it was working for them and they want their own business to be successful. And I ultimately got a little more money, but I had to learn how important one-on-one relationships are. And selling is really a very personal business, I think. And even in a world today of programmatic sales on the internet, face-to-face selling is so important. And so I started going to people's birthday parties and to weddings and I never, of course, never approached how good my competitor was at that. But I really learned how important that is in life, particularly in a technologically advanced world. Years ago, the book Megatrends [Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives] talked about the beauty of handwritten notes. I love writing handwritten notes. I love getting them. And I think the author, John Nesbitt called it high tech, high touch. As we become more high tech, high touch becomes all that much more important. And I learned that lesson of all places in El Paso, Texas.
Charlotte Burns: I love that story, Jarl.
Okay. What's the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night?
Jarl Mohn: [Laughs] Did I have too much coffee? I don't, uh, nothing keeps me up. My I worry about the world, I worry about politics, but I also know, there's certainly so much we can do, and I don't let that affect me. It doesn't affect my sleep. I do worry about it when I'm awake, though.
Charlotte Burns: Your collection is held in a trust. What if, what is the future of that?
Jarl Mohn: There are two collections. I think they're gonna be different futures for each. The emerging LA [collection] I will most likely gift.
Charlotte Burns: To one institution or to several, do you think?
Jarl Mohn: It's under consideration as we speak and we will figure that out. But it will be in LA because it is a collection of LA artists and that's gonna, I think, be relatively soon.
The minimalist collection has just become such a valuable asset, that I'll probably ultimately sell that. Although, I've never sold anything—I have a very strict no-sale policy—but I will sell that collection and that will fund our other philanthropic efforts, which we haven't talked about today, but things like supporting foster care, transition aids foster care, young adults in Los Angeles County literacy programs, social justice—like the ACLU here in Southern California—and our commitment to public radio here and nationally. So that collection will ultimately be sold to fund our other philanthropic interests.
Charlotte Burns: Wow. Even though you once said that nine times out of ten art will not be a good investment, that it certainly seems like a great return.
[Laughs]
Jarl Mohn: It was, but I never intended, and I just, sometimes you get lucky and we just got lucky on that.
Charlotte Burns: How do you feel when you talk about that? Do you feel proud? I guess you feel a mix of emotions, maybe a little sad.
Jarl Mohn: No, I mean of selling it? My kids are sadder about it than I am, not because of the financial aspect of it, but because they're going to be the ones that ultimately give away all the money, not me. But there's no element of sadness.
I was really happy that it happened, but I was very fortunate. I just, in my life, whether it's been my career or whether it's collecting, it gets back to the whole people thing. So many of the great things that have happened to me have been because of the intervention of really remarkable good people in my life that have given me opportunities and people that have come into my life just seemingly magically. So I don't have any regrets about that.
Charlotte Burns: I think it's so amazing, the idea that giving back so much. It sounds like it will change a lot of people's lives, supporting other children and changing their lives in that way is really quite profound.
Jarl Mohn: Thank you. I was unfortunate in that I ended up in that situation. I was fortunate that it made me discover radio and music, which was my way out. I was fortunate that a lot of people gave me opportunities.
Most of the time, things I was totally unprepared for and one of the, with things we haven't talked about it, I never graduated from college. I was asked to leave Temple University because I was such a terrible student. I would never show up. So I've had this remarkable career as a college dropout and I'm fortunate that people looked past it and gave me the great opportunities that they've had. And I hope I have given those opportunities to a lot of other people, particularly these foster youth that we're trying to help right now.
Charlotte Burns: It seems that you had something to prove too, that to some extent you, you seized upon those opportunities yourself and ran at them.
Jarl Mohn: Yeah. I don't know that I thought about it that way as much as, frequently being
naive enough to think I could do that and then after I got engaged in them, realized how difficult it was, and then ultimately putting great teams together, really good people to help me get from point A to point B over and over again. That's been what I'm grateful for.
Charlotte Burns: You'd said with E! for instance, that you didn't have the money to hire great people, but you knew that to get anything going, you really needed a great team because that was how you'd had success previously at MTV and VH1. So your strategy was to hire the second-best people, but you knew that out there, there would be a lot of people in the number two slot who were waiting for the number one slot and frustrated.
Jarl Mohn: Yeah. I had limited resources and you know, the number one ad salesperson at a cable network or the number one person in affiliate sales, or the number one person in programming costs an awful lot of money. It wasn't a matter of getting the second best, it was a matter of getting somebody in the number two position. That person might actually have been better than their boss. And I particularly looked at organizations where the number one leadership in any one of these disciplines was relatively young and didn't look like they were likely to go anywhere for a while. Then approaching the number two people and giving them an opportunity, an upside. It didn't always work, but we assembled a team mostly of people that were number two’s at other organizations and blocked and they really wanted their opportunity to grow and shine and that did work. That worked really well for us.
Charlotte Burns: So Jarl, I think our time has come to an end. I know your dog wants to go for a walk. I've so enjoyed this conversation with you.
Jarl Mohn: [Laughs] Thank you, Charlotte.
Charlotte Burns: The ‘what if’ is what if you were going to steal a piece of work? You said you were gonna steal Walter de Maria's Earth Work, the 1977 piece, The Lightning Field. You were gonna steal the 400 stainless steel rods one by one.
I'm just so curious, why were you gonna steal it so slowly?
Jarl Mohn: So that no one would notice that it was going.
Charlotte Burns: But wouldn't you stand a greater chance of being caught? [Laughs]
Jarl Mohn: Of course, but we're fantasizing here. This is, we're speculating wildly on something as absurd as stealing this one mile by one kilometer wide set of these 400-plus stainless steel 20-foot poles. I just thought it was funny that I would take them one at a time, that no one would really notice it until it was too late.
Charlotte Burns: Yeah, it's like Wile E. Coyote. I just had these visions of you driving off in a truck. Every day, returning.
[Laughs]
Jarl Mohn: But that work of art affected me more than any work of art. And I've seen some really great stuff, and I love Land Art and Rodent Crater is an amazing work, and it's stunning and it's mesmerizing. I like City from Michael Heiser. I like Star Axis, which a lot of people Charles Ross's work don't know as well in New Mexico. But I have to tell you my experience, spending whatever it is, 18 hours at Lightning Fields a number of times, it's just the most profound and sublime art experience. What would I do with the poles? I'm not really quite sure that I could find a place to put them, but that's the work of art I would steal.
Charlotte Burns: That would be collection number three, you know, starting you on a whole new phase.
Jarl Mohn: Stainless steel, 20-foot poles.
Charlotte Burns: Penitentiary probably.
[Laughter]
Thank you so much, Jarl. This has been an enormous pleasure. I could talk to you all afternoon. Thank you so much for being our guest today on The Art World: What If…?!
Jarl Mohn: Thank you.
Thanks so much to Jarl Mohn—such great anecdotes and advice. Next time, we’ll be talking to the director of the new Museum of West African Art in Nigeria, Phillip Ihenacho.
Phillip Ihenacho: We live in this world where West African culture is starting to become the future. We need to try and grab it with both hands and take full advantage of it because this moment, I think is an incredibly important moment.
Charlotte Burns: Don’t miss it. The episode is really quite special.
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.