Marina Abramovic

Saturday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Igor Levit’s 12-hour performance of Satie’s Vexations was far too short

So, in the end, it was long but not that long. Twelve hours, compared to the 20 hours-plus many of us had been anticipating. The fastest on record? Very possibly. Igor Levit had started Satie’s Vexations just after 10am on Thursday 24 April, and completed repeat number 840 of this niggly little bastard of a phrase around 10.30pm, preventing any kind of mass sleepover at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. No screens were required in the end either – screens that the Guardian had reported were scheduled to appear around the pianist to hide his modesty when the toilet beckoned. (The logistics of this seemed ambitious.) Instead whenever Levit decided it was

Igor Levit performing Satie's Vexations. Image: Pete Woodhead

Wednesday

Martin Gayford

Surreal visions: the best of this year’s art books reviewed

Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas first met in a gallery at the Louvre. Degas was standing, etching plate in hand, copying a picture. How audacious, Manet exclaimed, to work without a preliminary drawing. ‘I would not dare to do the same.’ And thus he revealed the essential difference between the two. Degas was a supreme exponent of drawing, while Manet was a magician of the brushstroke. In many ways they moved on parallel tracks, each interested in subjects from contemporary life, both at odds with academic convention. But their talents were at a tangent. Famously, they fell out after Degas painted a double portrait of his friend and his wife.