A trove of Arthur Conan Doyle’s papers – including a record of the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes – has been uncovered. “The archive, which contains more than 3,000 items, including letters, notes, manuscripts and artefacts, disappeared more than 40 years ago during legal disputes over his estate.”
Tag: 03.16.04
Order Of Phoenix Wins People’s Choice Award
JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has won this year’s WH Smith People’s Choice Book Award. “Some 148,000 readers cast votes via book stores, the internet and libraries to select winners in eight categories.”
LA Opera In The Fast Lane
“Los Angeles Opera is growing like a rambunctious weed. In 2004-5 there will be 100 performances, a 30 percent increase over this season. The budget of $48 million is up by a third over this season and double what it was when Plácido Domingo took over as general director five years ago. These numbers put Los Angeles in position to challenge San Francisco’s longtime West Coast operatic primacy and to surpass, in terms of quantity if not necessarily quality, other worthy companies like those of Seattle and San Diego.”
Berlin Biennial A Drag
Berlin is a great art city. But its Biennial is oh so wrong. “The biennial is subtitled Complex Berlin, and it is a complicated affair. It supposedly deals with the city itself; with politics, economics, club scenes, subcultures and “sonic scapes”; the city as a leitmotif, migration as a metaphor, division, history, integration and paradox. You get more sense of this, of course, walking Berlin, doing the Walter Benjamin thing, losing yourself. This biennial is a grind.”
Royal Academy Row Over Destroying Art To Get At Art Below
“A row has broken out among the guardians of Britain’s cultural heritage over the proposed destruction of an acclaimed series of Victorian paintings on a ceiling at the Royal Academy of Art, to “reveal” an earlier masterpiece.”
Trafalgar Statue Chosen
Judges have chosen the statue of a pregnant victim of thalidomide to occupy the fourth vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. “Alison Lapper says her portrait, by the artist Marc Quinn, is ‘naked, pregnant and proud’. Her portrait, made when she was eight months pregnant, was chosen last night by the judges to be created on a monumental scale, 4.5 metres high (15ft) in white marble, and take its place among the bronze generals and grubby pigeons on the fourth plinth which, despite more than 150 years of arguing, has been empty since the square was created.”