Why Paint Cats: The Ethics of Feline Aesthetics FROM OUR EDITORS
In 1994, Burton Silver and Heather Busch wrote Why Cats Paint, a tail-in-cheek celebration of feline artistic creation. Now these authors take another four-footed leap toward aesthetic advancement with this exploration of cats as canvas. This new movement celebrates the cat as a moving art object, a sort of skittish mural on the run. Why Paint Cats combines Busch's singular photographic studies with Silver's delightful in-depth interviews with artists and owners.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
While the popular and enduring Why Cats Paint (1994) profiled the creative output of house pets, highlighting tabbies and Persian long-hairs with smeary abstract canvases they ostensibly made, the authors' latest volume inverts the paradigm, and offers instead the cat-as-canvas. Rexes and Siamese sport rainbow colors on their faces and flanks or graphic designs on their hindquarters: cats are transformed into butterflies, or clowns, or furry American flags. Presented as the document of a developing art movement, the book features a potpourri of artists and their "schools" (Neo-Totemism, Semiotic Anthropomorphism, Avant Funk), pairing big photographs with faux-interpretive essays about each cat and artist. Perhaps the most amazing entry is a portrait of Charlie Chaplin, supposedly painted with peroxide and vegetable dye on the rear end of a ginger and white cat named Burger. Amusing as a novelty item if nothing else (and very amusing at that), the book also offers a gentle kick in the pants to the gods of art criticism: a cat painted like a fish, for example, succeeds in "redefining and blurring the relationship between fur and scale, fin and tail, in order to create a shared intent that transubstantiates the species and repositions the notion of symbiosis." It's all so weird that it's sort of irresistible. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
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