Ana’s Reviews > Erik Satie Three Piece Suite > Status Update

'Satie does what so few actually did: makes everyday life marvellous again.'

'Calling something "playful" as a way of not taking it seriously. The quality of lightness is too often underappreciated. The superficial playfulness of some practitioners of avant-garde art and music barely hides an intransigent, humourless, rhino-sized ego. Too many artists put a premium on difficulty, impenetrability, doom. No such transcendent value is afforded the light, the dizzy, the caressing.'

quincunx as the visual equivalent of a Satie composition

'[Boethius] possessed one of those long-ago minds which recognize no compartments in the love and pursuit of knowledge.'

'In the century since it first exploded, a lot of scandalous art has inevitably become defanged, installed as part of a safe new canon.'

'At the height of modernism, Satie is already a few steps on from everyone else. As critic and composer Constant Lambert puts it in 1934: "What distinguishes Satie from the other representatives of post-war Parisian mentality is the fact that while they were catching up with the times he had the no doubt gratifying sensation of seeing the times catch up with him."'