Getty Launches Ommm, a Mindfulness Podcast Built Around Art
The Getty in Los Angeles is trying something unusual for a museum known for its collection and architecture: a video podcast designed to slow viewers down. Titled Our Museum Mindfulness Meditation, or Ommm, the series is hosted by Getty gallery educator Lilit Sadoyan and pairs guided meditation with individual works from the museum’s holdings.
The first episode arrived on June 16 and centers on Vincent Van Gogh’s “Irises” (1889). Over the course of its first season, Ommm will include 12 meditation episodes and 12 bonus conversations with guests. The meditation selections range from Edvard Munch’s “Starry Night” (1893) and a 15th-century astrological diagram of the zodiac sign cancer to Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s “The Vexed Man” (1771-83) and the Getty Center garden created by Robert Irwin.
Sadoyan has spent 19 years at the Getty, and the podcast reflects a longer arc in her work as an educator and meditation practitioner. She previously organized Mindful Moment in the Museum and continues to lead The Breathe Tour, a program that combines breathwork with art viewing. Her approach is rooted in a simple but often neglected premise: that looking carefully is not only intellectual, but physical.
“What happens when we slow down? What happens when we just linger and stay with an object a little longer, and open ourselves up to other ideas, different interpretations?” Sadoyan asks in the project’s framing. For her, mindfulness is less a wellness add-on than a method for deepening attention, and for making room for ambiguity, memory, and surprise.
The works chosen for the series were selected in part because Sadoyan had built long-term relationships with them over years of teaching and practicing meditation and yoga. She also wanted images that would be recognizable to a broad public, since the exercises are meant to be done anywhere, not only inside the museum.
That portability matters. Sadoyan has led mindfulness sessions for more than 100 undergraduate interns, as well as visiting teens from underserved backgrounds and communities. She has also worked with a conservator and a neuroscientist at the Getty and the Peabody Essex Museum to explore the relationship between mindfulness and conservation, and she piloted a program that brings art into medical education.
As museums increasingly ask visitors to interact through QR codes and screens, Ommm offers a quieter digital alternative. It still uses a screen, but its aim is to restore duration, attention, and sensory presence to the act of looking — a modest intervention with broad implications for how museums teach, and how audiences learn to see.
