Now, let’s get to Reed Hastings…

Since founding Netflix in 1997, Reed Hastings has had plenty of opportunities—and no shortage of invitations—to start collecting art. But it’s only now, three years after ascending from C.E.O. to executive chairman, that Hastings has gotten into art in a big and rather visible way: creating an art park on Utah’s Powder Mountain, the ski resort he acquired soon after stepping back from day-to-day management of the company he’d led for 25 years. The Powder Art Foundation is accessible to the public year round—by foot, by ski, by mountain bike.

The outdoor sculptures are part of the overall appeal of Powder Haven, the exclusive public-private ski resort/real estate development whose lots are part of Hastings’ remit to sell. The art park, which is still in its early stages, includes slope-side pieces by Nobuo Sekine, Nancy Holt, Davina Semo, Kayode Ojo, EJ Hill, and Griffin Loop, whose massive metal paper plane is incorporated into a mountain biking trail and precedes Reed’s involvement. Works by James Turrell, Jenny Holzer, and others are coming. I spoke to Reed in December, less than a week after Warner Bros. Discovery announced it had accepted Netflix’s $83 billion offer for its Studios and Streaming assets, a deal Paramount Skydance is contesting with a hostile bid. The outcome likely won’t be settled for a while. For his part, Hastings seemed to be eager to wind down the year alongside his wife, Patty Quillin, the philanthropist and education advocate, and to get up to Powder Mountain to snowboard among the artworks he’s made possible. As always, this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mark Healy: Is what you’re accomplishing with the Powder Art Foundation satisfying in a different way from building Pure Software, your first company, or Netflix, or even your philanthropic work? Reed Hastings: Very much so. I do all this philanthropy around the world, and there’s the charter schools, there’s Netflix, and somehow it’s just not visual. As a percentage of assets and time, Powder has been quite low, and yet it has this incredible draw and, if I’m being honest, this sense of pride of being associated with it, because it’s really cool. The Sekine we put in this summer is fantastic, and meeting his widow and seeing it already in two different seasons—it just makes my heart sing. Everything else in my life is very functional—building a big company and getting a culture working, doing all that—and this is more emotional.

Have you had the experience of just stumbling upon any of the art that you’ve commissioned or acquired while snowboarding or hiking? What was that moment like? The first one was Davina’s bells. We’ve got them strung up between trees, and you can ski to it and it’s got a chain down the middle that allows you to ring the bells. She casts these 3-to-7-foot-tall bells, and they ring out across the landscape. It’s a little bit discreet—they’re in the trees—so you kind of gotta know. And of course, it’s an Instagram moment, and that helps spread the word. Then we just put in the Nancy Holt, which is a series of outdoor fire pits in a very unique grid representing the constellations. I’ve only been to that once, but in the evening when it’s lit, it’s pretty remarkable. And mostly, the team—Alex Zhang and Alex Magnuson and Matthew Thompson—operate independently. I’m not involved, nor really sophisticated enough to be involved in the picking, so a lot of it is installed, and then they tell me about it. So I really do get to experience it de novo. That’s very fun, and they’ve got incredible taste, and it’s deeply satisfying to see it coming together. Are people in the art world ever surprised by how hands-off your approach is? When I think of people I’ve worked with a lot, like Eli Broad or Don Fisher, they’re very proud of their curatorial chops. They’re a generation older than me, so maybe by the time I’m 80 I’ll be like that—but I don’t think so. I wrote a whole book for Netflix on freedom and responsibility and giving people a brief—in this case, making a reflective place where the pieces are in conversation with the mountain—and the money, and then letting them go. So it’s consistent with the whole culture I developed at Netflix.

Do you have a history of collecting art?

No, my time at Netflix was work and family, and that’s it. I really didn’t indulge or develop any passions outside of that. I watched a lot of films and went to film festivals, but that was partially for work. So we’ve never owned anything worth stealing. All this is the first capital-A art I’ve ever been associated with. Creating public art experiences comes with an extra obligation because the general public is going to have to live with it for a long time. Do you just trust your team to make it great? I’d be disappointed if it was trashy, but I don’t worry about it not being great. Because “greatness” is not very measurable. I’m not trying to win an art-collection award. And some of the pieces may seem not great at first, and then they age very well and become that much more sublime over time. So I’m not trying to judge it or measure it. I think the variety of the pieces is part of what makes for a magic landscape. The challenge is not getting overwhelmed by the landscape, and having it stimulate something special where, frankly, people start to come to Powder for the art, and the skiing and hiking are secondary. When did you and Patty first go to Storm King? Patty’s family lived just north of West Point, so right there basically. You know how you get a little restless visiting the in-laws, so one afternoon we went up there, and it was just so unexpected. My last trip there was about a month ago. It’s fun seeing it with the crowds in summer, or with the foliage crowds, but I’m trying to see it in different seasons just to see how that plays. So it was cold and there was a little bit of snow that day, and it was sublime because there are not many people around. We’ve been overt about saying Storm King is the inspiration. We could also say Naoshima, but that’s less wilderness-y, and it’s on such a large scale, especially on Teshima, that it feels like one level up from what we’re doing. Did you go to Naoshima on a research trip for Powder? No, I went as a tourist. It was 2018, 2019, and I was still full-time at Netflix. We like visiting places like that, but I haven’t been down to Inhotim in Brazil, so it’s not like I’m a systematic visitor to those places. There’s a number of ones I want to see, and that part’s exciting. Were there any commissions or artists that you were closest to? The Turrell, which we first experienced in Naoshima—he’s got at least two pieces there. When I first started talking to [Powder Mountain chief creative officer] Alex [Zhang], about three years ago, he said, “Well, there is a Turell you might be able to get.” And for me, that was like, What? That’s awesome! Now, we still haven’t installed it. It’s not quite like buying a sculpture and you can just put it somewhere. We have to build a building for it. But we finally found what we think is the right site for it, and we’re working with the architects, and so that’s coming together. [Turrell] and I have a slightly similar background in that we both studied a lot of math in undergrad. So we started talking about that, and then he invited us out to Roden Crater, which is highly unfinished, but it is shocking in scale. It just dwarfs everything around it. So that was super exciting to see the beginnings of what they’ve done. At the time you were planning this, the intersection of art and skiing was still an uncrowded space. Did you sense that opportunity to do something the way you think it should be done? I think you should think about it not as art and skiing, but as art and mountains, because the large visitation will be in summer and fall. But mountains has been done less. And it’s particularly nice because of the walking around and exploring them. When you and I spoke previously, you talked about the ski culture tradition of tossing bras from the chairlift onto a tree. You said, basically, Can’t we do better than that? Now when you look at Kayode Ojo’s chandeliers strung between the trees at Powder, you can’t help but think it’s an elevation of ski culture. I’m trying to avoid class-laden language, but I would say I think it’s more intentional. If we call the bras a sort of folk art, it’s getting at this juxtaposition—you’re a little bit taken aback. It’s fine the first time you see it, but then you see it in many resorts over and over. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point there’s, like, the golden bra that we do, or something that plays off it more directly, but more durably. But our chandeliers are in a place where there’s no lift, so it doesn’t invoke throwing anything. But it’s beautiful skiing, and when you ski through it, it could be in a grand ballroom, and nature is the ballroom. And so it’s got its own statement it’s making. You said at a recent Bloomberg event that you’re still learning the real estate business. Are you also learning that creating exceptional art helps sell real estate? Not particularly. All of the art is in the public zone. It’s not in the private zone. I mean, I think making the whole mountain beautiful—and Powder Haven, which is the private side, is also focused on beauty with a design and complementary sense—is part of the uplift of all of Powder Mountain, which also includes the real estate. If you want to sell real estate, you focus on real estate appreciation. It’s a little more like Bitcoin than I realized, where everybody loves it when it’s going up. You just want to manage that carefully. I would say that’s the real estate lesson. Do you feel like this is not just part of your legacy, but a way of giving the West something that you experienced in the East? I don’t feel like we’ve done that yet because it’s so incomplete. But that is the ambition. So in 10 years, I hope that it feels like that.

Thanks, Mark. I’ll be back on Sunday with more as we get geared up for the New Year.

M

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