In a previous blog, we did the readers' advisory thing and discussed a book called Why Cats Paint. The same authors, Burton Silver and Heather Busch, wrote a companion book, Why Paint Cats: the Ethics of Feline Aesthetics (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2002) (ISBN 9781580084727).
Silver and Busch present the colorful photographs with informed commentary about the ethical and artistic principles involved. Obviously, the authors are having some fun with their subject, as they did in their previous book. They're "sending up" scholarly tomes that drone on and on about artistic values and such like.
Clearly, the "painted" felines in these photos have been "photoshopped." That's part of the joke, of course. This is satire. No cats were actually painted upon.
I had written an ironic take on the book, in which I seemed to be taking it seriously ("at face value," as the saying goes), but upon re-reading it, my tirade seems overwrought and, frankly, tired. I try to use humor in this blog--sometimes with a tiny bit of sophistication--but it wasn't working, so I've deleted the rest of the post that I'd written before.
The book's funny on many levels. Enjoy the parody of overly serious academic treatments of art and laugh at the ingenuity of the photo editing.
Don't Photoshop My Pictures, Mind You,
Cauli Le Chat
MPL Roving Reporter
Serious Stuff News Beat
P.S. In his music CD The Persistence of Memory (2011), the Music Man composed an entire series of percussion selections musically interpreting the paintings of Salvadore Dali. To hear a few tracks from this CD, watch my Library's program trailers and book trailers below, which use the pieces as soundtracks.
