Latinos In America

By JOSH BARBANEL

Natalie Keyssar for The Wall Street Journal

A view of the Hudson River from Jeremy Lin’s new apartment at the Downtown W Hotel. The Knicks basketball sensation will rent the unit.

Jeremy Lin, the emerging basketball sensation, found a home in the Knicks’ starting lineup at Madison Square Garden just over two weeks ago.

Now he has completed another rite of passage for a newborn New York celebrity: On Wednesday, after a closely followed house hunt, he signed a contract to rent a furnished condo on the 38th floor of the residences at the W New York Downtown Hotel.

The two-bedroom apartment comes with a 4-foot-high sculpture in the glass-walled living room, original art on the walls, pots and pans in the cabinets and views out to the Statue of Liberty and the memorial pools at the World Trade Center.

Jeremy Lin recently found a home in the New York Knicks’ starting lineup. Now he’s signed a contract to rent a furnished condo on the 38th floor of the residences at the W New York Downtown Hotel. Josh Barbanel has details on Lunch Break.

It also comes with that staple of New York real estate, the celebrity discount, and shows the close connection between the upper echelons of the sports and real-estate industries in New York.

The apartment, with interiors furnished by Louise Sunshine, the doyen of New York marketing, had a listed rent of $13,000 a month. But Matthew Moinian, the son of the W’s developer Joseph Moinian, said Mr. Lin got a better deal, but declined to disclose the final contract price.

Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Jeremy Lin

“We were trying to accommodate him,” he said. “We want to help him as much as possible with his new life.”

Mr. Moinian said that his family had developed close ties over the years to a number of Knicks players and coaches, including with Herb Williams, the Knicks assistant coach and former player, who attended the younger Mr. Moinian’s bar mitzvah in the 1990s.

Mr. Lin said in a statement that he was attracted to the W Downtown because of its amenities and his familiarity with the W Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan, where his parents grew up.

“It’s a nice place to come home to with amazing views,” he said in the statement.

Mr. Lin had been sleeping on the couch in his brother’s living room, uncertain about whether he would be cut from the team, when he suddenly emerged from obscurity and began turning around a losing season.

Mr. Lin was anxious to find a place to move in right away and checked out Mr. Williams’s suggestion that he try the W Downtown, according to people familiar with the deal. Mr. Williams declined to comment through a team spokesman.

After looking at 20 apartments, Mr. Lin picked a completely furnished one that was already in contract for sale to an investor, who will continue the rental. The 1,182-square-foot apartment was listed for sale at $2.3 million, or more than $1,950 a square foot. The closing is scheduled for next month.

Ms. Sunshine said that she had created seven apartments on the 38th floor, fully furnished with midcentury objects and contemporary design, all of which are now in contract. The idea was to find rental tenants, and sell the apartments with tenants to investors, who would be able to draw immediate income.

Ms. Sunshine said she is now working on the furnishing and redesign of 25 other condos in the building.

During his apartment search, Mr. Lin was reported to have sublet a two-bedroom apartment at Trump Tower at City Center in White Plains, near a training site used by the Knicks.

But several people familiar with Mr. Lin’s apartment hunt said he had never actually lived there.

When he first came to the W Downtown, Mr. Lin stopped off at the BLT Bar & Grill at the base of the 58-story building, and was immediately mobbed by well-wishers, Mr. Moinian said.

After that, Mr. Moinian said he arranged with the restaurant to provide Mr. Lin regular access to the restaurant’s private dining room.

“You can’t live on room service all the time,” he said.

Write to Josh Barbanel at josh.barbanel@wsj.com

Click on the image to view five hoppers.

By PETER PLAGENS

‘Don’t be modest,” says a character in Mark Lee Luther’s 1924 novel, “The Boosters.” “It doesn’t pay. We’re all boosters in Los Angeles.” Alas, the city’s history of one booster campaign after another, from railroads, citrus growers and land salesmen, has left Los Angeles—for all the semitropical metropolis’s futurist gazing into the Pacific sun—with an inferiority complex. Through World War II, Angelenos directed their grousing at that small, snootty, ballet-and-opera city up the coast, San Francisco. More recently, the foil has been New York, and the resentment of Gotham is particularly sharp where modern and contemporary art are concerned. So when the lights were doused Oct. 2 on the gala-opening reception for the huge multi-institutional group of exhibitions that make up “Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980″ and a son et lumière spectacular commenced on every marbled wall of the Getty Center, it wasn’t long before a stentorian voiceover pronounced, “In contrast to New York Expressionism, artists in Southern California . . .”

Indeed, Andrew Perchuk of the Getty Research Institute has said, “For a long time it was thought that if you didn’t have a significant group of Abstract Expressionist paintings like New York or San Francisco, you couldn’t be a major art center.” The result, according to a Getty press release, is that “Southern California gave birth to many of today’s artistic trends—and yet the immensely rich story of how this came about . . . remains largely unknown.” The hoped-for corrective is “Pacific Standard Time,” a Getty-encouraged, Getty-subsidized (nearly $10 million in grants) collaboration among 60 Southern California institutions resulting in a smorgasbord of everything from handcrafted furniture to hard-edge painting, from guerrilla street performances to sculpture in aerospace materials—all made in California over the past 70 years or so—in shows rolling out over the next six months. With a little rental car and a pent-up urge to drive (I’m an Angeleno transplanted to New York a quarter-century ago), I took a look at about a dozen of the first PST shows, dispersed from Pasadena to San Diego.

PST boasts three centerpiece exhibitions—one at the Getty Museum itself, one at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s two locations, and one at MoCA in downtown Los Angeles. “Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-70″ (through Feb. 5) at the Getty is an elegant Cliffs Notes introduction. The show includes the sharply poetic, hard-edge abstract paintings (by Frederick Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg and others) that got the Los Angeles scene rolling in the 1950s; a choice selection of spooky assemblages by George Herms, the underknown black artist Ed Bereal (and, as always implicit throughout this account, “and others”); a roomful of big, airy abstract paintings by the not underknown Richard Diebenkorn and Sam Francis, and an assortment of what, back in the day, was called “fantastic object” sculpture in plastic and cast resin by Craig Kauffman and DeWaine Valentine. And what authoritative Los Angeles show could be without an Ed Ruscha “Standard Station” Pop painting? Certainly not the Getty’s table-setter.

“Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface” (through Jan. 22), at both MCASD’s downtown branch and its original La Jolla location, is the most visually satisfying meal on the PST menu. That’s partly because of the nature of the art—lovingly austere and mystically colorful abstract sculpture and atmospheric environments—and partly because the artists (Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, et al.) were so talented. And boy, were they young! Ms. Corse was only 20 when she ventured into lyrically all-white minimalist paintings (later to be deliciously complicated by the inclusion of highway-sign reflectivity) that make Robert Ryman seem like a Victorian schoolmaster by comparison. Kauffman, with his techno-lush plastic reliefs, emerges as the premiere object-maker of 1960s cutting-edge Los Angeles art. And the best works I encountered in my 500-mile pilgrimage were Mr. Turrell’s “Stuck Red” and “Stuck Blue” (both 1970), two brilliant vertical rectangles of light on separated walls. At first you think they’re merely projections, but then . . . sorry, you really have to see them for yourself. Messrs. Irwin, Turrell and Wheeler, in particular, manipulated light and space to create experiences, instead of objects, as works of art. Their pieces were, in my opinion, Southern California’s greatest contributions to art before 1980.

At the other end of the utopia/dystopia spectrum from “Phenomenal” lies curator Paul Schimmel’s “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981″ (through Feb. 13) at MoCA. Mr. Schimmel is fond of dark, borrowed titles. In 1992 he appropriated “Helter Skelter” from author Vincent Bugliosi (who borrowed it from mass-murderer Charles Manson, who borrowed it from a Beatles song) for an earlier MoCA anthology show. It too, exuded nasty sex, nasty violence and a generally Punk take on life (and death) in the Golden State. The current show’s title is taken from a song by “X,” the 1970s Los Angeles Punk band. Some of the same artists are back—Richard Jackson with his antipainting pancake stacks of canvases, Paul McCarthy with residue from his scatologically slapstick performances, and Llyn Foulkes with weird Pop-surrealist paintings.

One trouble with the exhibition is that a good deal of it unironically consists of the same stuff—dry typewritten reports, deadpan photos, graphs and plans and maps, etc.—employed by the art’s targets: corporations, the military and bureaucrats. (A hilarious exception: Jeffrey Vallance’s funeral documents for a dead chicken, a.k.a. “Blinky, the Friendly Hen,” that he bought in a supermarket). Another drawback of “Under the Big Black Sun” is a feeling that the disaffection is forced. CalArts and UCLA (where many of the show’s artists were students or teachers) aren’t the South Bronx. While dress-up abjectness on the part of artists is OK, the art should look genuine. The show seems like “Helter Skelter Lite,” perhaps because it is part of an otherwise upbeat civic initiative on behalf of Los Angeles art. Still, Mr. Schimmel gets credit for pretty much putting the lie to a New York critic’s estimate of the ’70s Los Angeles art scene as solely “hip young dropout types in Venice, Calif., making baubles for the rich.”

Posturing isn’t a problem with what I’d call the “learning shows” that try to correct the shunting aside of women, African-American and Latino artists during PST’s time period. They make fine use of the Getty largesse: bringing in outside scholars to help with the research, publishing fat, informative catalogs, searching out works crucial to the shows’ theses, and—best of all for a viewer—creating first-class installations. “Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building” (through Jan. 28) at the Otis College of Art and Design, for instance, would probably be an amen-corner jumble were it not for the time, womanpower and scrutiny the gallery was able to give to wall upon wall, and vitrine upon vitrine, of primary source material from the mid-’70s salad days of the women’s movement in the Los Angeles art world.

Just as female artists had more than qualms about proceeding with business as usual in a male-dominated art world (one straw weighing on the camel’s back was the publication of a 1969 calendar with 12 male artists in their cool cars), black artists in Los Angeles found it difficult to fiddle around with perceptual niceties after Watts burned in 1965. David Hammons, an eventual MacArthur fellow who would decamp for New York in 1974, said “I wish I could make art like [James Turrell's], but we’re too oppressed for me to be dabbling out there.” Nevertheless, enough solid, beautifully aggressive African-American art was made during a 20-year period in Los Angeles for the Hammer Museum to mount “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980″ (through Jan. 8), the most arresting show outside the centerpiece triumvirate. It contains several rediscoveries, among them assemblagist Noah Purifoy, whose works are certainly ripe for a retrospective. For my money, the small steel “Lynch Fragments” sculptures of the hardly unknown Melvin Edwards (a Guggenheim Fellow and professor emeritus at Rutgers) are the standout works of this exhibition. They’re compactly aggressive welded-steel amalgams of chains, tools and abstract forms whose crisply channeled anger makes “Now Dig This!” one of PST’s best early-round exhibitions.

“MEX/LA: ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930-1985″ (through Feb. 5) at the capacious Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach adds to the learning curve. It offers not only requisite glimpses of Mexican-American art, but a prologue of Mexican muralists in California in the ’30s and subsequently influential Anglo artists (such as painter-architect Millard Sheets) who learned so much from them. The show doesn’t shy away from cringe-inducing material—such as clips from Warner Bros.’ “Speedy Gonzalez” cartoons from the ’50s—which makes it a risky, lively mix. “MEX/LA” makes “Asco: Elite of the Obscure, a Retrospective, 1972-1987″ (through Dec. 4) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art look awfully thin by comparison. To be fair, Asco—a Mexican-American artists’ collaborative including Gronk, Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón and Patssi Valdez—performed such antics as taping Ms. Valdez to a wall as an “instant mural.” You probably had to be there; small photographic mementos of these thumbs in the eye of the art establishment are overwhelmed by the big Lacma galleries.

Your visit to Lacma will be salvaged by “Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud 1969-1972, Revisited.” It’s the first time this hokey but mesmerizing life-size assemblage depicting a black man’s castration by five rednecks has been shown in the U.S.

Getty money and encouragement has made the installations of some midtier shows first-rate, among them the old costumes and vintage videos of “Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983″ (through Jan. 29) at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, a peaceful refuge on an otherwise semiseedy Hollywood Boulevard, and an exhibition, “Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Wallace Berman
and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1976″ (through Jan. 22) at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. Berman was a great pioneer assemblagist who made mysterious cabinets with fragments of Hebrew letters and old photographs inside; Heinecken, a not-so-great photographer who turned soft-core porn into montages.

Finally, a mention of “California Design, 1930-1965: ‘Living in a Modern Way,’” at Lacma through March 25. An argument could be made that Southern California’s most significant contribution to modernism besides “Light and Space” art is its own style of industrial design. Bauhaus + beach: Low-lying hi-fi consoles, swoopy chairs, dude-ranch dresses, and those wonderful transparent “Case Study” houses up in the hills.

During my sampling of “Pacific Standard Time,” I saw more than the shows outlined above, but I also missed a few—and obviously I couldn’t check out PST exhibitions not yet open. Nevertheless, my eyes roamed over enough art and plowed through enough catalogs that I can ask a few nettlesome questions about the project. First, how is this vast undertaking supposed to be consumed? The venue of the northernmost PST exhibition, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, is more than 200 miles from MoCA San Diego. Southern California suffers a paucity of public transportation, and the roads are always crammed with cars. A Los Angeles artist remarked to me, “Whenever you get someplace on time on the freeway, you feel like you’ve put something over on somebody.” Only a few dedicated art professionals and academics will manage to see all 70 or so PST exhibitions, and most people only a few.

Second, isn’t PST preaching to the choir? If the Getty and participating institutions want to make the case that modern art in Southern California is right up there with New York’s or anybody else’s, shouldn’t at least the three centerpiece shows be on view at MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston?

Third, is not PST’s very existence a tacit admission of minor-leagueness? (I spent my childhood in a Los Angeles without major-league baseball and can still remember how having to make do with the old Pacific Coast League rankled the adults.) It’s hard to imagine Chicago, whose postwar art also got short shrift in New-York-centric histories of modern art, mounting a “Central Standard Time” campaign.

Finally, it’s been said that generals always fight the previous war. Command Central at the Getty may not have noticed, but the art world has gone global: There are biennials in Korea and Turkey, a huge production and consumption machine in China, and multizillion-dollar museums rising in the Middle East. Contemporary art from India is the current hot item, and South America is champing at the bit.

Of course, these considerations should be more PST’s than mine. I care about seeing good art—no matter how many Hummers in the left lane slow my pursuit of it—and not so much about grand cultural strategies thought up by grand museums. Being able to gaze upon the most gorgeous object that Judy Chicago, one of the founders of the Women’s Building, ever produced—a painted Corvair car hood at the Getty show—and to look at one of Senga Nengudi’s lovely and prescient stretched-nylon sculptures at the Hammer Museum—these are the kinds of experiences that made my sojourn rewarding. A little boosterism is fine, but in the end, who cares which coast has the art-historical upper hand? It’s the art that counts.

Mr. Plagens, a writer and a painter, is at work on a book about the artist Bruce Nauman, to be published by Phaidon.

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Norfolk, Va.

Travelers passing through Grand Central Terminal between 1950 and 1990 could hardly avoid Eastman Kodak’s “Colorama” advertisements. Piercing the gloom of the station’s cavernous main hall like stained-glass windows that promised a better life here on earth, these backlighted transparencies were scaled to compete with outdoor billboards in Times Square. Measuring 18 feet high and 60 feet across, they were promoted as the world’s largest photographs. Every day for 40 years, more than half-a-million viewers could look up and bask in these colossal testaments to American plenty and pulchritude.

“Colorama,” at the Chrysler Museum of Art, revisits this influential campaign and asks us to appreciate the photographs as feats of engineering and propaganda. A total of 565 Coloramas were made, but none have survived intact. The 36 panoramic prints in four rooms here, scanned from negatives at the George Eastman House, which organized this traveling show, are as close as the under-30 generation will ever come to the glowing force of the originals.

Even at 1/12th the size that they were in Grand Central Terminal, these are knock-out examples of color photography. Kodak had the financial resources to lure prime talent. Ansel Adams, Ernst Haas and Eliot Porter accepted the challenge of making images that could be read quickly by passing crowds.

No locale was too exotic to send a photographer and a crew. It was not excessive to spend a week underwater waiting for the fish to cooperate. Retouching and assembly took even longer. As it was not possible to manufacture enormous single sheets of film, each image was a sort of celluloid tapestry, made from 41 strips of positive transparencies (later versions used only 20), made on special enlargers in Rochester, N.Y., each piece stretched across a frame and hooked tautly in place over the station floor. Illuminated by a mile of tubing, they were like slides for a Brobdingnagian projector.

A new ad went up on the wall every three weeks, but the message never varied: Kodak color film could make a perfect moment out of anyone’s drab existence. In retrospect, it was shrewd but cruel that harried commuters had to walk under photographs of fellow Americans who seemed to have endless horizons of leisure time.

To prevent ambiguities from disrupting the intended meaning—a notorious problem with snapshots—each image was as tightly crafted and relentlessly wholesome as Walt Disney’s movies or Norman Rockwell’s magazine covers. (Indeed, Kodak enlisted Rockwell’s directorial skills for at least one Colorama, an elaborate scenario of a family’s “chaotic” departure on vacation in their station wagon.)

Genial subject matter was doubly effective if it presented opportunities to showcase the film’s ability to capture saturated primary colors. Photographs in the Chrysler Museum’s first room include one of a couple at the Bronx Botanical Gardens (now known as the New York Botanical Garden) as tulips are blossoming and another of pink-skinned contestants at an America’s Junior Miss Pageant.

Later rooms (and examples in a 25-minute video on the history of the genre) feature scenes of family togetherness at the dinner table and around a backyard swimming pool, arrays of puppies and kittens and babies, travel scenes from Portugal and Peru, snow and water sports, and a discotheque full of clean-cut frugers.

Adams, represented here with a golden-hued tableau of an Oregon wheat harvest, once called Coloramas “aesthetically inconsequential but technically remarkable,” an accurate judgment during the 1950s but one that did not anticipate their impact on a generation more attuned to camp than his own.

Created in an era before corporate advertising realized the benefits of mocking itself, these photographs were designed with the utmost sincerity, their absence of irony making them seem over time to be only richer in that quality.

With 40 years to choose from, the George Eastman House curators, Jessica Johnston and Alison Nordström, have taken only a thin slice. Almost all their examples were made in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when assassinations, riots, the Vietnam War, student protests and other social upheavals were roiling the body politic.

Not a trace of these developments can be seen in the smiling and homogenous world on display here. African-Americans did not appear in a Colorama until 1969, and many ethnic groups hardly registered at all. The country glorified by Kodak here not only is no more, this show submits that it never was.

Art photographers since the early ’80s have emulated the controlled approach taken by the photographers employed in this campaign. The images of Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson have more in common with Rockwell’s illustrations than with Robert Frank’s street photography.

The self-referential aspect of the Coloramas—almost all of the stagings included someone in a group taking a photograph—feels eerily contemporary. A Kodak mother here photographing her daughter playing with her dollhouse could be a work by Laurie Simmons; it lacks only the feminist quotation marks. Jeff Wall laces his fabricated images with nods to modernist and premodernist painting. But the cinematic grandeur of his light boxes owes as much to the materials of the Coloramas as to Marxist art theory.

The campaign ended in 1990 when Grand Central Terminal was restored to a less cluttered state. The farewell image combined a huge red apple beside the World Trade Center towers. If these sad ironies were not enough, this exhibition trades on affection for Eastman Kodak as the company is fighting to survive in the digital economy. The optimism depicted in the Coloramas may have been a sham; what they represented for a once-dominant company was not.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

By KYLE WESTAWAY

You may have noticed the emerging class of “social entrepreneurs” who are creating companies that seek profit but also are devoted to a social purpose, to create long term, sustainable value.

Social entrepreneurs believe a business can be a part of the solution to some of the world’s greatest challenges. It’s this kind of thinking that has given rise to such mission-driven companies as Better World Books, TOMS Shoes, D-Light Design and Warby Parker, to name a few.

But, until recently, social entrepreneurs would find themselves in the position of choosing whether to organize either as a for-profit company or a nonprofit organization. The problem was that sometimes a company would be too much of a business to be a nonprofit. Yet, it also might be too mission-driven to be a for-profit.

Fortunately, there are a few innovative legal structures designed for entrepreneurs who are driven as much by mission as money. The cost of using one of these new legal structures will vary depending on lawyer fees, but generally those fees shouldn’t exceed more than $10,000 for a start-up with fewer than 10 employees.

Here’s an overview:

L3C

Ideal for: companies that want to blend traditional capital with “philanthropic” capital, such as from foundations

Available to start-ups in: Vermont, Michigan, Wyoming, Utah, Illinois, North Carolina, Louisiana, Maine and soon in Rhode Island.

The Low Profit Limited Liability Company is a new class of LLC for mission-driven companies.

An L3C offers the same liability protection and pass-through taxation as an LLC. But it must be organized primarily for a charitable purpose – and secondarily for profit. Unlike a traditional nonprofit, it may distribute its profits to owners.

The L3C is designed to attract both traditional investment and a very specific type of philanthropic money called Program Related Investments (PRI). PRI is capital – in the form of equity or debt – from a foundation to a for-profit company that is doing work in line with the charitable purpose of the foundation.

BENEFIT CORPORATION

Getty Images

Ideal for: companies that want to create a measurable positive impact while and providing greater transparency to the public

Available to start-ups in: Maryland, Vermont, Virginia, New Jersey, Hawaii, California and soon New York

The Benefit Corporation is a new class of corporation with a corporate purpose to create public benefit, a broader fiduciary duty and is transparent about its overall social and environmental performance.

By definition, it must operate for the general public benefit – defined as a material positive impact on society and the environment. Every benefit corporation is required to publish an assessment using an independent, third-party assessment tool. To create a material positive benefit, a benefit corporation operates in a manner that not only creates value for the company’s shareholders, but also its community, environment, employees and suppliers.

The structure also calls for a high level of transparency and accountability. Within 120 days after the end of each fiscal year, a benefit corporation is required to publish a “Benefit Report,” which states how it performed that year on a social and environmental axis.

FLEXIBLE-PURPOSE CORPORATION

Ideal for: companies seeking to do good on their own terms

Available to start-ups in: California

The Flexible Purpose Corporation a new class of corporation that creates the maximum amount of flexibility for socially/environmentally conscious companies. It is designed for businesses that want to pursue profit along with a special purpose of its own designation.

The structure allows the designation of a special purpose that the company will pursue in addition to profit. For example, a flexible purpose corporation might be a for-profit developer that has a special purpose of building a public park in each of its developments.

This type of corporation must issue an annual report that is available to the public and provides details on the following: the special purpose; the annual objectives that it has set to achieve its special purpose; the metrics used to gauge the success of the special purpose; how it has achieved or fallen short of the stated objectives; and how much money was spent in furtherance of the special purpose. But it does not require any measurement against an independent third-party standard.

By SHEFALI ANAND

Relying on expert forecasts to make your investments is like putting your full faith on the weatherman. They may be right. Or not.

Like the start of every other year, experts are already expounding on how various markets will perform this year. Where will India’s stocks be in 2012? Will gold’s price go higher from here, and should we buy or sell?

Wouldn’t we all love the answers to these questions, but a more important one might be: how accurate are these predictions?

Not very, if 2011 is any gauge.

Last year, fund managers, strategists and analysts at top Indian and foreign brokerage houses had widely expected India’s benchmark stock index Sensex to climb 15% to end the year at 22,000 points. These pundits stuck to their targets even after stocks fell in the first half of 2011, saying things would change in the second half.

They did. For the worse–the Sensex fell 25% last year to close near 15,455.

For gold, analysts had predicted a year-end target between $1,500 and $2,500 per ounce. It closed the year at $1,565 an ounce.

Some got it right, and some were way off the mark.

Forecasters cite a list of “unanticipated” events in 2011, which caused their targets to go haywire. These include a worsening in the financial health of European countries, the downgrade of America’s credit rating, the Japan earthquake, the unrest in many Arab countries, the relentless increase in interest rates by the Reserve Bank of India, the sharp fall in the Indian rupee, and India’s widening current account and fiscal deficit.

These are all important factors, but will analysts be able to better forecast unanticipated events that could well occur in 2012?

We’ll only know the answer at the end of this year.

But academic research doesn’t support the idea that analysts can accurately and consistently forecast stock price movements or company earnings.

In a study conducted over several years, American economists John Cragg and Burton Malkiel tracked the one-year and five-year earnings estimates of analysts at 19 of the most respected Wall Street firms.

They found that analysts’ estimates weren’t much better than naïve estimates made by assuming that a company’s profits would grow at the rate at which the country’s national income has grown.

“Short-term forecasting performance may fairly be described as poor; long-term forecasting success was only slightly better,” concluded the study.

These findings were reinforced by a study conducted by professors Michael Sandretto of Harvard University and Sudhir Milkrashnamurthi of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes Mr. Malkiel in his book, “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.”

These professors studied forecasts of 1,000 of the most widely-followed companies and found that over a five-year period, the average annual error of the analysts’ forecast was 31.3%. “Investors who put blind faith in such forecasts in making their investment selections are in for some rude disappointments,” writes Mr Malkiel.

To be sure, these studies are based on U.S. stock markets and are a bit dated, but anecdotal evidence from India shows we don’t have perfect forecasters here either.

Kishor Ostwal, chairman and managing director of Mumbai-based brokerage firm CNI Research Ltd., said in late 2010 that the Sensex could cross 30,000 points in 2011.

Mr. Ostwal now says that 2011 “particularly was a bad year.” He says, “Dynamism is a must in the equity market…As per the market, we try to change our views, every seven days and 15 days.”

That may be fine for Mr. Ostwal, but generally speaking, frequent forecast changes and too much trading is hazardous for individual investors, according to academic research. This is partly because the transaction fees involved in buying and selling ultimately eats into returns.

So if we can’t fully trust the expert forecasts, how can we investors make money this year?

The answer is this: most individuals should rely on these time-tested investing mantras, not just for 2012 but for every year of our investing life:

Spread your bets: Since no one can accurately predict whether stocks will be the best performers this year–or whether it will be gold or debt, your best bet is to try to benefit from all of these. “You need to have money across all assets,” says Sandesh Kirkire, chief executive of Kotak Asset Management Co.

This means you should put some money into stock mutual funds (large, medium and small-company stocks), some in debt (bond funds and fixed deposits), and less than 10% in a gold investment. The rationale, of course, is that if one part of your portfolio loses value, another will hopefully make money, thus keeping your portfolio from being too volatile.

The benefits of diversification have been extensively extolled by academic research.

This mix between equity, debt and gold is called your, “asset allocation,” and it should be decided based on your time period of investing and risk-bearing ability. For instance, people saving for 5-10-15-year goals, like a child’s education or retirement, should consider investing 50% or more in equity funds.

Know when to sell and buy: As the year goes on, market analysts will keep changing their forecasts — don’t let that change your asset allocation.

That doesn’t mean you forget about your investments. Check them once or twice a year to keep them on target.

For example, let’s assume that for every 1,000 rupees in your portfolio, you have 500 rupees in equity. After last year’s decline of 25%, the stock portion of your portfolio would have gone down to just 375 rupees. You should be adding 125 rupees now to bring the stock allocation back to 500 rupees.

Many of you must be wondering if it’s crazy to suggest buying stocks after they’ve lost so much value. It’s actually just the opposite.

Buying stocks now means you are buying them at a lower cost. So the reverse holds true in terms of reallocating your portfolio, meaning that when the stock market rises and that 500 rupee investment becomes 650 rupees, you should sell. You would put part of that 150-rupee profit into a different asset which has lost value to maintain your investment ratio.

This is the basic strategy to making profits–buying low and selling high.

This strategy, better known as “rebalancing,” has been tested over time and proven to benefit investors in the long run.

Making Bets: Maybe you have an uncle or an accountant friend who gives you a “tip” on an investment likely to soar this year. Suppose you are confident in this uncle or friend’s forecast. It is fine to make your get-rich-quick bet if you must, but the key is to do so without betting the house on it.

Keep the bulk of your investments in the broad asset allocation, and use only 10% to 20% of your portfolio to buy flavors of the year. This way you limit the risk of losses to less than 20% of your portfolio.

This strategy is used by sophisticated investors and is called the core-and-satellite strategy–build a strong core and bet with your satellite or play money.

Start now: No predictions or investing tips can help you unless you start saving and investing immediately. The sooner you start, the more you benefit from the magic of compounding, which is basically earning a return on your return. Investing just 1,000 rupees ($19.4) per month, which earns a 10% return, will give you a kitty of nearly 1,340,000 rupees ($26,000) in 25 years.

So what are you waiting for?

Write to Shefali Anand at shefali.anand@wsj.com

By TODDI GUTNER

Q. I was laid off six months ago. I am basically still an entry-level employee even though I got a bachelor’s in 2005 and a master’s in 2007, both in economics from Ivy League institutions. Then I took a job at an investment company that I viewed as a stepping stone. After a few months, the company and I came to the mutual agreement things weren’t working out. I feel like I’ve used every strategy: networking, cold calls, recruiters, company Web sites and direct emails. After a bunch of phone and in-person interviews, I always get the same reaction: “You have a great educational background, but don’t have the experience we want.” How do I get over this hurdle, especially in an economy where people with double the experience will take a lower-level job?

A. You’ve clearly done a great deal to land yourself a new job, says Sheryl Spanier, a career coach. If you’ve gotten interviews based on your resume, this means that your background at least met some set of criteria employers were seeking. Otherwise they wouldn’t have reached out to you, she says.

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Take a hard look at your interviewing skills. Your failure to move past the initial interview stage likely has something to do with the way you carry yourself during the meetings, says Ms. Spanier. “It might be about how you present yourself or the attitudes or opinions you express,” she explains. If this is the case, you’ll want to try and figure out what you need to improve. Practice your interviewing skills — what you say and how you say things — with a friend or mentor and get feedback, she suggests. Hone the “story” you’re telling and try to determine if it is helping you be considered as a viable and committed candidate.

Meanwhile, look for different and creative ways to build your experience and increase your odds of qualifying for more positions. “Volunteering with an organization where you can apply your skills is a great way to accomplish two key aspects of career development,” says John Heins, senior vice president and chief human-resources officer at Spherion Corp., a staffing firm.

Volunteering can help you keep your momentum going, as well as explain gaps in your employment. It can also help you to expand your professional network, as you may be working alongside someone who could be in a position to recognize your talent and drive, says Mr. Heins.

Similarly, you might consider pursuing project work or an internship for six months at a company that interests you, says Ms. Spanier. “You can gain the experience and exposure and [the company] will appreciate your contributions.” In this market, it’s all about trying to showcase your skills and internships are one way to do that, she says.

Write to Ms. Gutner at cjeditor@dowjones.com. If you have a question for the careers columnists, be sure to put Career Q&A in your subject line.

Por KENNETH MAXWELL

TOKIO—Pese a que los desastres del 11 de marzo del año pasado sumieron a Japón en una recesión y redujeron el consumo interno a su nivel más bajo en más de 10 años, algunos de los mayores fabricantes de bienes de lujo del mundo han anunciado que sus ingresos en el país crecieron por encima de 10% en 2011.

Pero no todo lo que brilla es oro. Los ingresos de las casas matrices de Louis Vuitton y Gucci reflejan el alza de 7,7% en el valor del yen frente al euro, la moneda a la que se traducen sus resultados financieros.

Y aunque las ganancias son una luz después de años en que las ventas japonesas palidecieron en comparación al crecimiento en los mercados emergentes vecinos, los analistas saben muy bien que no deben esperar un resurgimiento a gran escala en el mercado de lujo japonés, el cual lleva mucho tiempo en un estado inerte.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, la mayor compañía de bienes de lujo del mundo y dueña de marcas como el champán Moët & Chandon, informó que sus ingresos de este mes en Japón subieron 10% frente a igual lapso del año previo a 1.970 millones de euros (unos US$2.590 millones).

Al eliminar las fluctuaciones del tipo de cambio el cuento es otro.

LVMH confiesa que de no haber sido por el efecto cambiario y cualquier adquisición o venta, su ingreso en Japón habría caído 1%.

Japón está perdiendo relevancia para las empresas de bienes de lujo en términos de ventas globales.El país aportó apenas 8% a los ingresos de 23.700 millones de euros de LVMH el año pasado, mientras que Asia en su conjunto y sin contar a Japón generó 27% del total, gracias a los consumidores en mercados emergentes ávidos por productos de lujo y que representan mejores perspectivas de crecimiento.

Hace cinco años, Japón equivalía al 13% a los ingresos de LVMH. Asia, excluyendo Japón, contribuía 17%. El cambio se replica en otras empresas del sector.

Otro factor que infla los ingresos del mercado japonés de lujo, cuyo valor ascendió el año pasado a 18.500 millones de euros según la firma de consultoría Bain & Co., son las adquisiciones de alto perfil.

El año pasado, LVMH compró la joyería italiana Bulgari SpA, con una sólida presencia en Japón, por 4.300 millones de euros y consolidó sus operaciones.

LVMH no desglosa ventas por marca, pero en el último año completo de Bulgari como empresa independiente, la joyería anunció ingresos en torno a los 200 millones de euros en Japón, su mercado más importante.

LVMH, el conglomerado domiciliado en París, no estuvo disponible para comentar para este artículo.

La historia es parecida en PPR SA, que gestiona marcas como Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga y Gucci.

Sus ingresos en Japón subieron 12% el año pasado a 938,5 millones de euros. Pero al excluir los efectos de las fluctuaciones cambiarias o la venta o compra de algún negocio, el crecimiento habría llegado a un más modesto 5,6%, impulsado por la expansión de la compañía en el segmento de artículos deportivos a través de su marca Puma.

El año pasado, PPR adquirió la marca de moda masculina italiana Brioni y el fabricante estadounidense de prendas de surf, skate y snowboard Volcom.

Ejecutivos de PPR no quisieron comentar para este artículo.

Sin embargo, es muy probable que los resultados no sigan siendo tan color de rosa en Japón.

En primer lugar, el Banco de Japón ha estado reduciendo sus pronósticos para el crecimiento de la economía.

Además, la decisión sorpresiva del banco central la semana pasada de relajar su política monetaria y establecer una meta específica de inflación podrían mostrar que Japón parece determinado a poner un freno al fortalecimiento del yen.

En el lapso de una semana, el euro se apreció frente a la divisa japonesa y superó los 105 yenes. En la práctica, eso significa que cada bolso o billetera que se compra en una tienda de lujo en Tokio de una marca europea, se traduce en menos euros para sus fabricantes.

By RAYMUND FLANDEZ

See Correction & Amplification below.

Franchise restaurants, hit by higher commodities prices and a cutback in consumer spending, are aggressively searching for ways to slash costs.

Many of these businesses can’t pass on the higher costs to customers without losing even more business. So, they’re trying to find alternative ways to save — including changing vendors and packaging, altering delivery schedules, cutting serving portions and even prolonging the life of fryer oil.

Restaurants feel they have no choice, as some chains are posting some of their worst monthly sales declines. Ruth’s Hospitality Group Inc.’s same-store sales at its company-owned Ruth’s Chris Steak House locations fell 15% in October. Ruby Tuesday Inc. experienced a 10.8% drop in same-store sales; California Pizza Kitchen Inc. had a decline of 7.3%; and Red Robin Gourmet Burger Inc. posted an 8% drop.

“These restaurant operators are really operating under a perfect storm, dealing with record [high] commodity prices, higher labor costs with the minimum wage increasing and falling consumer demand,” says Robert Marzo, senior analyst of food service for F&D Reports, a retail consulting firm in Great Neck, N.Y. “Many of [them] can no longer offer the same quality ingredients that they have in years past, so they’re downgrading in any way that they can.”

They’re getting “creative with their recipes, using cheaper ingredients and offering smaller portions in an effort to stay afloat,” he adds.

Here’s a look at a few efforts by chains and their franchisees to save money and draw in customers:

Ruth’s Chris Steak House

Big Steaks Management LLC, a franchisee in Pikesville, Md., operates several Ruth’s Chris Steak Houses in Maryland, North Carolina and New Jersey, and has seen 5% to 10% declines in revenue for the past six months.

So the company recently looked to reduce freight costs for the first time by buying meat from one vendor — and getting just one delivery per week from that vendor — instead of using multiple vendors with various deliveries throughout the week.

In North Carolina alone, Big Steaks’ three Ruth’s Chris Steak House locations will save $22,000 a year on its weekly purchase of 3,500 pounds of meat, says David Sadeghi, chief operating officer of Big Steaks Management.

Meantime, the franchisee hopes to get more business by offering fixed-price holiday-party packages for the first time. “We need to have the holiday parties to keep our employees employed,” Mr. Sadeghi says. Customers “had an open check last year or the year before, [but now] they can’t afford to go up a couple thousand dollars. They need to keep in the budgeted numbers.” He says holiday bookings are up 10% so far from the same period last year.

Church’s Chicken

Church’s Chicken, owned by Cajun Operating Co., is looking to squeeze out savings from the ingredients and other products it uses. For instance, the Atlanta-based franchiser is testing the idea of filtering the shortening for frying in order to stretch a batch’s use to 14 days from the current 10 days. That would save the company $1 million next year. It also is shrinking the scoop size of its biscuits to 2 tablespoons from 3 tablespoons, for a saving of $1.8 million a year.

Another cost-cutting move: It has eliminated the chicken diaper, which is used to absorb some of the liquid in raw-chicken cases — for a savings of $800,000 a year. The company also plans to change its french-fry packaging from cardboard sleeve to paper, which will generate $700,000 in annual savings.

The franchiser says there have been minimal customer complaints about the changes.

IHOP and Applebee’s

DineEquity Inc., the Glendale, Calif., parent company of IHOP and Applebee’s restaurants, is consolidating the vendors the two restaurant chains use — and, in the process, is getting a discount by buying more from the vendors it does keep. DineEquity purchased Applebee’s a year ago and found that there was 75% overlap among IHOP’s and Applebee’s vendors.

The company says the new purchasing plan, which it hopes to have in place by January, would save the company millions of dollars each year. “That’s the biggest opportunity to assist [franchisees] in the cost of goods,” a DineEquity spokesman says.

Marco’s Pizza

At Marco’s Pizza, owned by Marco’s Franchising LLC of Toledo, Ohio, restaurants are looking to save money on their purchasing process.

They are ordering larger amounts less frequently, are working with vendors to lock in transportation costs and are choosing manufacturers that are closer to distribution centers to help reduce freight costs. Marco’s expects these and other changes to save the company a total of $2 million a year.

For example, scaling down to once-a-week deliveries will save a Marco’s franchisee with five stores more than $3,500 per year overall.

The company also is trimming packaging costs. It has eliminated its small pizza boxes at more than 170 stores in 14 states. Instead, it’s now using the box for CheezyBread for both products. That will result in a saving of $164,000 a year.

Tumbleweed Restaurants

Tumbleweed Restaurants Inc., a grill chain based in Louisville, Ky., is showcasing its lower-priced fare. The company has moved higher-priced food, such as red-meat grilled items, to the back of its four-panel menu, while putting lower-cost, more-profitable items, like tacos and burritos, front and center.

The result: Less-expensive items are being ordered more often. So food costs as a percentage of total operating costs have fallen to 33.2% from 34.2% since January at 44 full-service restaurants — a savings of $500,000.

Write to Raymund Flandez at raymund.flandez@wsj.com

Correction & Amplification

Same-store sales rose in the third quarter at the Church’s Chicken, IHOP and Marco’s Pizza chains. This article and headline about cost-cutting strategies at franchise restaurants suggested that the chains’ same-store sales were falling.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page B7