The answer applies to every creative or innovative endeavor, where outside financing is required, and it requires a shift in thinking. When you’re working on any creative project, you have to believe in it strongly and sustain yourself through the development process. You have to shield yourself from doubt, and you must cradle your project with love and support. You have to fall in love with it.

But when it’s time to take your project to the outside world of investors, you need to make a case for its existence in financial terms. Your love won’t matter. You need to prove the likelihood that an audience or market exists.

Luckily, there’s process you can follow right now. You have to show there are “comps” – “comps” is a term-of-art for comparative products or services, for example, comparable books, plays, movies, iPhone apps, etc… Finding comps is free (my favorite price) and you can do it right now (my favorite time).

To be true, a comp must be the same thing. It must compare apples to apples. Let’s take movies as a case study. A comp movie must be the same genre, the same language, the same budget, the same level of recognizable casting, the same age and gender protagonist, the same rating (I’d lump PG and PG-13 together), and within the past 5 years. (Older than 5 years is no longer relevant for today’s market.) You’ll want to make sure you have at least 5 comps, because fewer than that and you won’t be able to make a convincing argument to potential investors.

Let’s say, for example, you have a great female-lead romantic comedy screenplay about a woman who’s always the bridesmaid, never the bride, and you want to attract investors. How do you find comps? Amazon makes it easy. Go to amazon.com, and search for a romantic comedy, say 27 Dresses (2008).

Down below the information on 27 Dresses, you’ll find a bunch of other movies, under the heading “Customers who bought this item also bought…” Most of them will be romantic comedies. This is your initial list of possible comps.

But they are not all comps. If 500 Days of Summer (2009) comes up, it would not be a comp. Why not? Because 27 Dresses was made for $30 million, and 500 Days of Summer was made for $7.5 million. Because when 27 Dresses was made, Katherine Heigl was a bona fide star, and when 500 Days of Summer was made, Zooey Deschanel was not yet a star. Comps must be like-for-like-for-like across the board.

(How did I know the budget of those movies? I Googled it. That’s what you would have done, too.)

Let’s say you have assembled a list of recent romantic comedies that are comps, including Bride Wars (2009), Leap Year (2010) and The Proposal (2009). No the budgets are not all the same (they are in the range of $20-$40 million), but they are in the range of studio movies, not indie movies, and that’s what you’re comping in this example. Now you want to find out how much money each movie made. There are 3 good databases you can use: the-numbers.com, boxofficeguru.com and boxofficemojo.com. They each may have slightly different information, such as budget, international performance and home video results, so it’s worth checking them all – your investors certainly will.

Based on these comps, you can begin to figure out the plan for your movie – the plan that may attract investors or studio financing. If you don’t have a recognizable star, you’ll soon discover you can’t make your movie for more than a certain budget-level, if at all. If you do have a star, you’ll discover there is a maximum budget that makes sense, given the likely box office returns.

Generally, when I have worked at companies that finance films, we don’t use the highest-grossing or the lowest-grossing comps, because those are “outliers” – we’re looking for the middle-of-the-road, reasonable expectation of what might happen to our money if we make an investment.

Finding comps works for everything – not just movies. You could do the same with books, websites, hair care products, software applications. Amazon remains a great search engine for many kinds of comps, and of course your own experience will supplement Amazon’s suggestions. For some industries, the amount of sales may not be as easy to discover as movie box office numbers, but nearly every industry has an industry association that collects data and reports it annually. If you can’t find it easily (or if it isn’t free), check with the business desk of your local public library. I have found business librarians to be savvy and inventive when it comes to ferreting out numbers, and often public libraries subscribe to databases that would cost money for you to join. All this service is free with your library card.

Yes, finding comps takes some work. It is important for two reasons.

First, this is what your investors are going to do. (A studio, or a publisher, or a distributor, are all investors: anyone who will have to give you money or spend any money on your work is an investor.) You need to turn yourself inside out, become outward-facing, and think like an investor for a moment.

Second, it pulls you out of yourself and forces you to engage in evidence-based decision-making. When we’re working on a creative project, we must believe strongly in it. We convince ourselves it will be great. Over time, that conviction becomes sanctified, even religious, to the point where we cannot imagine that other people won’t value our project as much as we do. But they won’t. We have to prove its value to them.

That’s The Ugly Truth (2009). (Not a comp: it was rated R.)

Adam Leipzig publishes Cultural Weekly and trains entrepreneurs and creatives how to get their greatest work into the world.

Images: 500 Days of Summer; photo from our weekend workshop.

There are some notable differences between the US system and Finland’s:

1. Teachers in Finland are given prestige, decent pay and a lot of responsibility.
2. Finland has no standardized tests; teachers are trained to create tests and assess students independently. (Periodically the government assesses all schools.)
3. The system is cooperative rather than competitive. Schools are not ranked or measured against one another.
4. There are no private schools in Finland. You can shop around at different public schools, but they are all of the same high quality.
5. Finland pursued education reform by aiming its teachers and schools at the goal of achieving social equity (“every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location”), not excellence.

This last point (no surprise) is the one that Americans studying the success in Finland seem to miss. Education in Finland “is seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.” Finland has achieved excellence through the pursuit of equity.

A couple weeks later, with Finland’s approach and success still on my mind, I came across another intriguing article on education reform, this one at the university level.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece on Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford University, who recently gave up his tenure track position to found, Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online education. What prompted Thrun’s move? Evidently the professor watched as the IRL enrollment for his artificial intelligence class dwindled while its popularity (among students at Stanford and around the globe) exploded online, eventually reaching 160,000. Thrun has set a goal of reaching 500,000 people with one of Udacity’s first course offerings.

When addressing his motivations for the move, Thrun commented that when universities were first being created, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information” but that despite the invention of new tools (like film and digital technology) “professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago.”

Here’s what I’ve been thinking the past couple weeks, in large part because of these two articles.

In ten or twenty more years does the nonprofit arts and culture sector want to be the US education system: excellent art for rich people and mediocrity, lack of resources, and lack of opportunity for everyone else? Or do we want to be Finland’s: high quality artistic experiences (or “an expressive life’ as Bill Ivey might say) for every man, woman, and child? Like most universities, do we want to limit our reach to those that have the time, money, privilege, proximity, and courage/comfort (see Nina Simon’s brilliant post Come On In and Make Yourself Uncomfortable) to access us at our venues? Or do we want to collaborate as a sector with the goal of making it possible for anyone to have affordable (online, big screen, small screen, gaming system, etc.) access to high quality arts education and performances?

At the end of the Chronicle of Higher Education article Thrun is quoted saying:

I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill … and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill and I’ve seen Wonderland.

The clock is ticking.

The arts and culture sector in the US needs to be reformed.

Just because the arts have been an elitist form of entertainment as long as most of us can remember is no excuse for that to continue to be our story in the future.

Just because we have wrongly and self-servingly bought into and sold to others the idea that to be ‘talented’ you had to be a ‘professional’ and to make ‘art’ you had to be a ‘nonprofit’ doesn’t mean we need to continue to make the same mistake.

We got it wrong the first time.

If our goal for the next century is to hold onto our marginalized position and maintain our minuscule reach—rather than being part of the cultural zeitgeist, actively addressing the social inequities in our country, and reaching exponentially greater numbers of people— then our goal is not only too small, I would suggest that it may not merit the vast amounts of time, money, or enthusiasm we would require from talented staffers and artists, governments, foundations, corporations, and private individuals to achieve it.

Let’s be Finland. Let’s pursue Wonderland.

Diane Ragsdale is currently attending Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where she is researching the impact of economic forces on US nonprofit regional theaters since the 80′s and working towards a PhD in cultural economics.

Re-posted with permission from Jumper.

- B. H. Fairchild, Beauty

As far as I can remember, I only heard the word beauty spoken a handful of times during some twenty-two years of formal education, most likely in connection with lectures on art or music. And even then, only in its secondary, adjectival form. Beauty as a noun, attended by its own adjectives, never appeared in any of the curricula I can recall. Or in any of the conversations that still clutter my mind. It made a somewhat belated, but forceful, entry into my consciousness in its nominative form through a prose poem entitled – simply – Beauty, by the poet B.H. Fairchild in his slim volume, The Art of The Lathe. Few written works have moved or disturbed me more.

The only use of the nominative form of the word beauty that came onto my radar screen before then was against the background of mathematics and physics. Mathematicians and physicists ordinarily hold themselves to the highest standards of rigorous, un-negateable hard data in determining that something is real, and therefore, just possibly, true. But since venturing into the unsettling realm of quantum physics, where almost everything is counter-intuitive – to say the least – one of the words they often use to justify their belief in its validity is beauty. This is not a word physicists and mathematicians use lightly; they feel it is impossible that something so powerful in its predictive power, so rationally pure, could be other than the very embodiment of beauty.

Whether or not physicists care to admit it, beauty is an emotional, not a rational term. Mathematicians prefer to say they discovered mathematics, they didn’t invent it. They claim that the mathematics underlying not only quantum physics, but all of the physical universe, exists independently of the human mind. So why delve into the emotional corners of the human mind to find a word to define it?

Why isn’t beauty a noun in our educational system? What could be more important in understanding who we are as humans? Can beauty be taught? Should it be taught? What would a class in beauty be like; what would it cover? Therein lies the rub. How can any meaningful definition of beauty encompass both art and quantum mechanics? But that’s exactly what makes beauty so important and interesting and exciting.

It is hard to imagine beauty being incorporated into a school curriculum in these days of teaching to the test. There is nothing in beauty to assimilate – only the fleeting suggestion of something to synthesize, each mind for itself. Still, imagine that somewhere during your education you were asked simply to think seriously about beauty. Not told what beauty is; just asked what you thought beauty is. How would you recognize it? Which portion of your brain would be mobilized – the rational part or the emotional?

Make no mistake about it: it is only in the mind – in the human brain – that beauty is ultimately defined. This places a certain constraint on conjoining beauty with mathematics, but so be it. We have some idea which portions of the brain are activated by beauty in response to art. (Two recent articles I’ve enjoyed, and pondered, are The Golden Beauty: Brain Response to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures and Beauty and the Brain.)

Wouldn’t it be intriguing to compare functional magnetic resonance images of the brain of a physicist pondering the deeper realms of quantum mechanics with the images produced by an artist looking at a great work of art, with the images you generate simply thinking about your private vision of beauty. What if they lit up the same regions of the brain in each situation? What would that tell you about you? About us? About beauty? 

William Clark, author of Sex and the Origins Of Death, writes books on science and medicine for the informed public.

B. H. Fairchild’s poem, “Beauty,” appears in The Art Of The Lathe, London, Waywiser Press, 2002.

Image: This is a Plate from the series WORKS VII (Feelings) by Yoel Tordjman.

There are much better exhibitions I have seen in the past and somehow quickly forgot. But here’s one, which I saw over the weekend at the Hammer Museum, that I cannot stop thinking about even though some of the artworks there, to put it politely, are not very good.

So let’s start with the difficult-to-pronounce, exotic name of the artist, Alina Szapocznikow. Born in Poland in 1926, she endured, as a child, unimaginable tragedy, first in a ghetto and then in a concentration camp. The exhibition starts with a video showing the charming, soft-spoken Alina talking about her art. I felt immediately won over by her sweet personality. I wish I could say the same about her art.

Until I received the catalogue of the exhibition, which introduces Alina Szapocznikow’s work to the American public for the first time, I didn’t know about her. And to be honest, seeing photographs of some of her sculptures, made out of cheap looking colored polyester resin and glass, and depicting mostly deteriorating body parts, my reaction was “yuck.” And indeed her works are not very photogenic; to fully appreciate them, one needs to see her sculptures and drawings in person.

Learning about Alina’s fight, first with tuberculosis and then with breast cancer, which ultimately claimed her at the age of 47, it is impossible to judge her works objectively. Knowing about the drama and tragedy of her life, one simply cannot help but see her art through the prism of her personal story. It is obvious that towards the end of her short life, her art was getting stronger and more daring. What’s really sad is that given a few more years, she would surely have reached her artistic potential and probably even become a great artist.

And still, I left the museum in a very good mood, thanks to another exhibition there, introducing us to the smart and adventurous private collection of Susan and Larry Marx, dedicated supporters of the Hammer Museum. There are 150 mostly small and medium-sized drawings and paintings, many of them by major artists such as de Kooning, Pollock and Joan Mitchell. The Marx collection demonstrates a rare, admirable consistency of their going after the best works by famous and established, as well as less well-known artists.

A few choice early works by de Kooning made me think about his recent knockout exhibition at MOMA. A small volcano of an oil painting by Joan Mitchell is yet another example of these collectors knowingly zeroing in on an artist, at his or her absolute best.

Towards the end of the exhibition, one is greeted by a large, luscious, abstract painting by Mark Bradford, with his trademark reference to an aerial view of Los Angeles. Lucky for San Francisco, the major traveling exhibition of this celebrated Angelino artist is opening, as we speak, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. One wonders what Gods we need to pray to, for this exhibition to come here, to Los Angeles, his hometown.

Edward Goldman is the art critic for Los Angeles NPR-affiliate KCRW-FM/89.9-FM, where his ArtTalk airs every Tuesday at 6:44 pm Pacific Time.  Formerly employed by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Goldman is a sought-after consultant and frequent public speaker.  He teaches an ongoing seminar on art collecting, which he calls his “art gypsy caravan.”

Top image: image: Alina Szapocznikow, Souvenirs, 1967; Polyester resin and photographs of Christian Boltansky and Twiggy; © The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/ADAGP, Paris; Courtesy Broadway 1602, New York.

Re-posted with permission from ArtTalk.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Halberstam said, “I think noise at a sports event is terrific, but I wouldn’t miss the gratuitous noise of rock-and-roll stuff that they put on all the time. I would not miss the departure of the DH. I wouldn’t miss the celebration of self. I wouldn’t miss Barry Bonds, if he hit a home run, pausing to admire himself before going to first base. Not just Barry Bonds, but everybody else who does it. I believe in the old idea of get down to first base and then you can break into your trot. The manifestations of ego, the sack dances…. Some of those emotions are really genuine, but an awful lot of them we could do without. There’s too much self-celebration based on too little evidence.”

Daniel Okrent, the former ombudsman for the New York Times, said, “I wouldn’t miss the shouting, and when I say shouting I mean not just the broadcasters but also the strutting and shouting of the players — the me-me-me attention that they get. I wouldn’t miss the home-run game. I like the small-ball game better, but we’re in a home-run-game era. I wouldn’t miss the language of war being applied to football, which I think began in the Nixon administration and hasn’t left.”

Armen Keteyian, the head of research for CBS News, said, “I wouldn’t miss poker on television if it left the planet. Nah, that’s not a sport.” Echoing Okrent, he added, “I wouldn’t miss the self-aggrandizement, the look-at-me culture that has long past crept in and has now buried in many respects what is really pure and good. And anything that has to do with sports and reality television. This, to me, is cringe TV.”

Sandy Alderson, the GM of the New York Mets, had just one item on his list: organ music.

Likewise, John King of CNN offered the briefest of lists: “The wave.”

New York Times columnist Harvey Araton said he would not miss the three-point shot. NBA Hall-of-Famer Jerry West agreed and added, “I can do without the dunk shot, too, by the way. One point for a dunk.”

Fellow basketball Hall-of-Famer Joe Dumars said, “The touch fouls. The game is so physical, and then all of a sudden a touch foul is called. That’s why you see guys saying, ‘You have got to be kidding!’”

Former New York Times columnist Ira Berkow, said, “Every time a guy gets fouled in basketball, he argues. Every time a batter gets a close pitch, he looks like he’s going to run at the pitcher.”

Steve Kerr, former President and GM of the Phoenix Suns and now a broadcaster for Turner Sports, said he wouldn’t miss “that little circle underneath the basket where the players take charges. I wouldn’t miss time-outs. I wouldn’t miss the circuses that go on at half-time of NBA games.”

Peter Gammons of the MLB Network said that he would not miss the DH. “And I’m not an old-schooler,” he said. “I just think the game is more versatile without the DH. I think one rule is better for the game. It’s silly to have separate rules, with American League teams having the DH in National League parks and vice versa.”

Sean McManus, President of CBS Sports, said he would not miss “any performance-enhancing drugs — an absurd phrase. I read that as being cheating. It’s a stain that’s been put on the entire sports world.”

National Magazine Award-winning writer Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated compiled a short list: “Bats that break so easily. I have a real fear that somebody’s going to lose an eye before they get a grip on this. I wouldn’t miss PSLs. I wouldn’t miss baseball games starting at 8:30 and ending after midnight and days off in between tournaments and games and playoffs and World Series where they just stretch out forever. I wouldn’t miss boxing, you know, with the total way that it’s legislated and run.”

Broadcaster Marv Albert said he wouldn’t miss “some of the long pre-game shows where the same stuff is being discussed over and over. People are making predictions. I always feel, ‘What do predictions mean?’ I realize they’re filling time, and it’s a very inexpensive way to fill time because you don’t have to spend money on production pieces. But there are so many people, particularly during the football season, making predictions. I don’t think it has any significance at all. It’s a guess. You may have all the information in the world, but it’s a time-filler. I wouldn’t miss that.”

John Walsh, Executive Editor at ESPN, said, “The clichéd, robot-like responses to questions by athletes, coaches and owners, and everybody in sports. That would be right up there.”

Sports agent Tom Reich said, “Some of the questions that are asked of the players are so far afield, are so inappropriate, it’s like nails across a chalkboard. Sometimes I wonder how the players can possibly deal with some of the questions.”

Jerry Kavanagh is a former editor at New York Magazine and Conde Nast.

Images: Opera Australia’s 2011 production of The Mikado; the boredom of TV poker.

I believe that the streetsweeper lives alone,
sleeping
through the cold days, waking clear-eyed and deft
as the sun goes down.

I believe that he works steadily without a portable
radio or a reading light or a nap.  When he pauses
it is to stare placidly into
the potent night.

For reasons too numerous to mention, I think
about the
streetsweeper often and about the singular,
provident
cadence of his life.
 
 
Grand Avenue
When the Lexus hit that pigeon, he lay there
beating his one good wing against the curb
like he was trying to put out a fire.

My wife asked me to do something, so I
turned his head clockwise until I heard
a click.  Then darkness poured out
of the small safe of his body.

That is when I realized I used to
merely love my wife.

Now I would kill for her.
 
 
Ron Koertge’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and a California Arts council grant.  Indigo (Copyright © 2009, Red Hen Press) is his most recent book of poetry.

I came home
Wednesday night from class
and Lori was ensconced
like a caterpillar in a cocoon
on the bed, watching a movie on tv
about crazy people who fall in love
and break china.
“Szymborska died,” I said.

She reached for the remote
and shut the tv off.
The room expanded
into that quiet bubble we experience
when we shut off the tv.

She looked at me and said nothing.

What was there to say?

A friend dies, a poet dies, poetry lives on:
There’s nothing you can say.

It’s like turning off the tv,
and their passing
fills the space of our lives
with all that silence.
A balloon of being and nothingness,
a reduction of existence
into a series of appearances,
overcoming those dualisms
that have embarrassed philosophy
and replacing them with the monism
of the phenomenon.

I put the clipboard
I still had in my hand
on the dresser
and began to undress.
Then I got in the bed
and lay beside her.
We still hadn’t spoken.

Szymborska was gone.

We just lay there for a bit,
in the silence,
not sure who would break it,
not sure whose turn it was
to turn the moment
back into words.
You need a poet
at a time like this,
and the poet was gone.

There was a small crack in the ceiling.
And a tiny cobweb in the corner.
Later, Lori’d probably get on a chair
and with a tissue
wipe it away.
That was her job,
getting those little tiny spider webs
gone before they engulfed the house,
our lives, the planet. Don’t
worry, dear reader, she’s on the job.
You will be safe.

“What’s my job?” asks Lori
when she’s nagging me.
And I repeat the mantra:
“To take care of me.”

But for now, with Szymborksa’s passing
still blooming into silence,
the cobweb
would have to wait,
the crack
would just have to bide its time.

Such a long silence.

Then I thought, fuck it.
I reached for the remote
and clicked the tv back on.

There went a teacup.
Crash.
There went another.
Crash.
It was good to get back
to a semblance of the world,
all that love and passion,
all those broken teacups.

Wisława Szymborska, who died February 1, 2012, was a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

Jack Grapes is an award-winning poet, playwright, actor, teacher, and the editor and publisher of ONTHEBUS, one of the top literary journals in the country.

We are proud to be premiering this poem today.

Actually, several hundreds years ago we still had more than the 12 piano notes even in Europe. But in the last 400 years the micro tones, or the notes in between the piano keys have vanished from the vocabulary of musicians and cultures in the West. We still have the micro tones – for example the notes in between C and D, or between Do and Re – we do still have them, in the Middle East and in Asia.

I play some of these notes on my Oud, as it is a fretless instrument and one can slide on the strings and play any note beyond and above the limited 12 notes of the piano. You can hear it on the CD Under the Olive Tree – Najwa Gibran & The Yuval Ron Ensemble in the song “Walla Zaman,” you can hear it on the CD Oud Prayers On The Road To St Jacques – Yuval Ron in the track “La Illah” (which was recently was included in a the soundtrack for the Mark Magidson film Samsara).

My friend Steven Taylor explored this world of micro tunings through a very special teacher, most people never heard about. You can learn about this amazing man and his sonic world, in a new video and web site Stephan created with my friend Gary David and another fellow musician. This is not only a super cool video and a great service for the development of music composition and performance in the West and beyond, but also a spiritual cosmological perspective on music making.

Here is a link to the Sonic Sky video by Steven Taylor.

Yuval Ron is an internationally acclaimed world-music artist, composer, producer, educator and peace activist. His concert schedule is here.

Re-posted with permission from Yuval Ron’s Blog.