Chihuly, Kahlo and more: Blockbuster art in the garden

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Atlanta (CNN)Outshining the lush foliage that surrounds it, a glorious spiked tower of indigo blue glass blooms near the entrance of the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

Take a left turn past the garden entrance and a star resembling a prickly sea urchin welcomes visitors to the Great Lawn outside the garden conservatory, where sinewy glass growths in fiery shades of red and orange shoot up from landscaped beds.
Some of internationally renowned artist Dale Chihuly’s 19 glass installations are easy to spot throughout the 30-acre garden.
    Others, like the serene turquoise marlins congregating in the Japanese Garden, are tucked away in hidden areas and may require a map to track down.
    Famous for his plant- and wildlife-inspired installations, Chihuly’s six-month Atlanta engagement is drawing new and returning fans to the garden, which first hosted his work in 2004 and has two Chihuly pieces in its permanent collection.
    Atlanta isn’t the only big city garden adding art exhibitions to its acres of native and exotic plant life.
    No longer simply home to beautiful displays of blossoming flowers and native plants, public gardens around the country are attracting big audiences to view blockbuster art exhibitions.

    The ‘wow’ factor

    “We call it the wow factor — wow, you have to see this,” said Sabina Carr, Atlanta Botanical Garden’s vice president for marketing.
    “Like a museum, you always have to offer something new and different … to attract new visitors and new members,” said Carr, who also serves as president of the American Public Gardens Association.
    While gardens are also tasked with educating their audiences about how their food is grown, climate change and the environment, they first have to get people in the door.
    Art seems to do it.
    Atlanta’s 2004 Chihuly show increased the garden’s membership by 200% and helped spur about $110 million in donations over 10 years, garden officials said. That paid for the garden to nearly double its footprint.
    The first show at the tiny, five-acre Tucson Botanical Gardens had a similar impact.
    “Nature Connects, Art with LEGO Bricks,” opened at Tucson in September 2015 and featured 13 nature-inspired LEGO creations.
    “Attendance zoomed 63% in three months, and we gained 618 new members,” said Tucson executive director Michelle Conklin.
    Conklin hopes “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” which will open in Tucson in October, will have the same impact.
    Gardens can’t simply nurture their plants and hope people come to see them again and again, she said.
    “You have to give people a reason to come, and come again, and the first time you get them so excited, they want to come again,” Conklin said.

    ‘Bringing the garden to life’

    Conklin didn’t have to develop the Kahlo exhibit on her own.
    The New York Botanic Garden, which is in the Bronx, created the Kahlo show, which explores the Mexican artist’s botanical inspirations and their symbolic significance. The New York show premiered in 2015.
    “Frida brought the garden to life last summer,” said Karen Daubmann, the New York Botanical Garden’s associate vice president for exhibitions and public engagement. “It broke all attendance records.”
    The garden displayed a reimagined version of Casa Azul in Mexico City, Kahlo’s lifelong home where she eventually lived with her husband, artist Diego Rivera. The New York garden also featured a scale version of the pyramid in their home garden, where Rivera displayed part of his art collection.
    While New York had 250 acres to host the exhibit, Tucson has only five, so the exhibit will be scaled down a bit.
    Still, the natural environment in Arizona, with desert landscapes and cacti similar to those seen in Kahlo’s work, is much more in line with what inspired the artist.
    Between the blockbuster exhibitions, gardens make additional efforts to attract visitors with new restaurants, cocktail hours and musical performances. Holiday light exhibitions attract families during the slow winter season.
    Some gardens forgo high-profile, temporary art shows altogether, opting instead for a steady lineup of homegrown events.
    The Chicago Botanic Garden is one such garden. Nature-themed holiday events and an orchid show to attract visitors to its hothouses in the freezing months of February and March are among its seasonal offerings.

    Art in the garden

    But before the cool weather sets in, there are a number of headliner special exhibits to enjoy across the United States.
    Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania

    The

    The New York Botanical Gardens exhibit, “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” will debut in Tucson on October 10 and will run for eight months. The show is included in the $13 admission price.
    New York Botanical Garden, New York
    The garden’s latest show, “Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas,” is indoors in the garden library’s art gallery and the conservatory through September 11.
    The conservatory hosts an American impressionist garden, with flowers that influenced John Singer Sargent and other impressionists. The gallery displays more than 20 paintings and sculptures by impressionists, showcasing the natural influences on their work.
    The show is included in the price of admission, which ranges from $20-$25 for adults depending on the day of the week.
    Atlanta Botanical Garden, Georgia
    Nineteen of Dale Chihuly’s art installations will be featured at the garden through October 30. Admission to the park is $21.95 and includes the exhibition.

    Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/01/travel/botanic-garden-art-shows-2016/index.html

    Why EU state aid is not the right tool to fight tax avoidance

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    Rather than pursuing companies such as Apple for what they did in the past, we should focus on shaping a fair tax system for the future

    Nobody will accuse me of being lax on state aid enforcement. In 2008, when European Union member states were about to embark on a subsidy race to bail out banks hit by the financial crisis, I stated that state aid rules are part of the solution, not the problem. And while many disagreed with the application of state aid rules to bailouts, I advocated the enforcement of tough restructuring obligations for state-aided banks.

    However, state aid is not a cure for all ills. Today, there is a broad sentiment that multinational companies do not pay enough taxes, that they are using mismatches between national tax laws to lower their tax burden.

    State aid is not suited to deal with such mismatches. It is a tool to address instances where a member state has made an exception to its own rules and given a specific company an advantage. To know whether that is the case, one has to understand how corporate taxation works.

    International corporate tax principles dictate that companies pay taxes where value is created. In the modern world, companies create value through design, marketing and intellectual creativity. It is where those activities take place that the profits really originate.

    It is therefore no surprise that US companies with research and development and intellectual property developed in the US will pay most of their taxes there, and not where the products are made or sold. Of course, the same principles apply to innovative design-focused European companies that sell their products abroad.

    EU member states have a sovereign right to determine their own tax laws. State aid cannot be used to rewrite those rules. However, the current state aid investigations into tax rulings appear to do exactly that, by suggesting a radical new approach to so-called transfer-pricing rules that determine where profits shall be allocated. By doing so, the commission risks undermining the important work carried out within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) through its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project.

    Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/01/eu-state-aid-tax-avoidance-apple

    Why don’t young people like bar soap? They think it’s gross, apparently

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    (CNN)Let’s fight about soap. What’s there to discuss, you ask? Plenty, if new consumer research is to be believed.

    Apparently, there is a serious ideological divide when it comes to bar soap and the people who put it on their bodies.
      For one, bar soap sales are declining.
      What was once a staple of our daily ablutions is being eclipsed by fancy-pants body washes and other cleaning options.
      According to research from Mintel, a marketing intelligence agency, bar soap sales fell 5% between 2010 and 2015.
      Mintel says bar soap “suffers from several negative perceptions.” Forty eight percent of consumers think bar soaps can be a haven for bacteria and other decidedly unclean stuff. Young consumers believe this the most, with 60% of soap buyers between the ages of 18-24 saying they are squicked out by the idea of germs on their soap.
      (For the record, there’s research going back as far as 1988 that says, while bacteria might be present on a bar of soap, the likelihood it will hurt you or even transfer to your skin is really low.)

      But wait, there’s more

      There’s more to this emerging “Bar soap is for old people” theory: One third of the 25-35 year-old set would never use bar soap on their face, as opposed to about 60 percent of people aged 65 and up.
      Overall, 55% of consumers also thought bar soap, which has a tendency to slip around and puff up when left to its own devices after a wash, is less convenient than liquid options.

      Talk amongst yourselves

      Bath product preferences are a deeply personal, so there may be some trepidation in discussing soap among friends.
      Please, buck the taboo!
      Are there any bar soap die-hards out there? Is it really that much more inconvenient than liquid soap, which requires a secondary item (washcloth, scrub, puff, etc) to be optimally applied? What is the best way to keep bar soap from making like a greased-up pig and shooting our of our hands mid-shower?
      This may be the biggest deterrent from the bar soap lifestyle. No wonder people think it’s full of germs if it spends half of its life trying to escape down the drain! There’s a lot to unpack here, so don’t be shy.
      The future of our hygiene depends on it.

      Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/29/health/bar-soap-sales-on-the-decline-trnd/index.html