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Why Paint Cats: The Ethics of Feline Aesthetics
WHY PAINT CATS ruffled fur in 2002 with its scholarly study of a controversial art movement that treats cats as canvas. Those seminal books in feline aesthetics are now offered in new pocket-size editions filled with the best from each volume, making purrfect gifts for cat lovers and art lovers alike.Reviews"A collection of the world'¬?s most fabulously decorated felines."-National Examiner
144 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2002
3 people are currently reading
153 people want to read
About the author
Burton Silver
43 books1 followerSilver was born in 1945 and attended Wellington College, later completing a B.A. at Victoria University of Wellington in psychology and sociology and Asian Studies.[1] He worked initially as a boilermaker's assistant on Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory, Australia and later as safari guide based in Darwin. Returning to NZ he developed and sold short skis, the Fiessen Resin 120 before travelling in Asia where he worked briefly as an advisor to the Indian High Altitude Warfare school in Gulmarg. At London’s Tulse Hill School in the UK he taught English as a second language.
His best-known cartoon series, Bogor, was written for the Listener Magazine and featured a lone woodsman and the forest animals that were his only companions (especially a hedgehog). An earlier cartoon, OB (written under the pseudonym "Roux"), had as its main characters a bird, a snake, and a rock, and was initially inspired by Silver's time spent in the Australian outback. Bogor first appeared in the Listener in 1973, and was New Zealand's longest-running published cartoon series.[2]
He is well known in New Zealand for his spoof Country Calendar television programs like The Radio Controlled Sheep Dog, Rural Music, Non Stress Farming and Rural Fashions.
He is known internationally for his humorous cat art books (created in collaboration with painter and photographer, Heather Busch: Why Cats Paint, Why Paint Cats, and Dancing with Cats, and the Museum of Non Primate Art, (monpa.com), as well as his spoofs Kokigami: The Intimate Art of the Little Paper Costume (Japanese paper decoration for the tumescent male genitalia, also in collaboration with Heather Busch), and The Naughty Victorian Hand Book: The Rediscovered Art of Erotic Hand Manipulation (with illustrator Jeremy Bennett). Other books include What Bird Did That? A Driver's Guide to Some Common Birds of North America (co-authored with Peter Hansard), The Kama Sutra for Cats (illustrated by Margaret Woodhouse) and Versability, a poetry game similar to Dictionary, where players create new lines for poems rather than new meanings for words (co-authored by his wife Melissa da Souza). His most successful book to date is Why Cats Paint that has sold over 750,000 copies worldwide. He has over one million books in print and been interviewed about them on television in the USA, Germany, and the UK. (The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.")
One of his inventions is the sport of GolfCross, played on a golf course with aerial goal-nets and a golf ball in the shape of a rugby ball. There are Golfcross courses in France, Germany, Argentina, Scotland, England, Ireland, and New Zealand.
Silver's last project (co-authored with Martin O'Connor) was a relationship book titled "Everything He Hasn't Told You Yet: A New Way to Get Men talking About Stuff That Matters". The book uses the Scenario Method that works by putting a man at the center of hypothetical situations thus allowing him to share what he really thinks and feels. Everything He Hasn't Told You Yet was released in the United States in October 2007. The book received a starred review in the Library Journal
Silver has also developed "The Fringe Games" (Fringe Games-Christchurch, New Zealand) which is an international festival of new and experimental sports designed to run in conjunction with the Olympic Games.
He lives with his wife near Martinborough in New Zealand and is currently working on a novel.
His best-known cartoon series, Bogor, was written for the Listener Magazine and featured a lone woodsman and the forest animals that were his only companions (especially a hedgehog). An earlier cartoon, OB (written under the pseudonym "Roux"), had as its main characters a bird, a snake, and a rock, and was initially inspired by Silver's time spent in the Australian outback. Bogor first appeared in the Listener in 1973, and was New Zealand's longest-running published cartoon series.[2]
He is well known in New Zealand for his spoof Country Calendar television programs like The Radio Controlled Sheep Dog, Rural Music, Non Stress Farming and Rural Fashions.
He is known internationally for his humorous cat art books (created in collaboration with painter and photographer, Heather Busch: Why Cats Paint, Why Paint Cats, and Dancing with Cats, and the Museum of Non Primate Art, (monpa.com), as well as his spoofs Kokigami: The Intimate Art of the Little Paper Costume (Japanese paper decoration for the tumescent male genitalia, also in collaboration with Heather Busch), and The Naughty Victorian Hand Book: The Rediscovered Art of Erotic Hand Manipulation (with illustrator Jeremy Bennett). Other books include What Bird Did That? A Driver's Guide to Some Common Birds of North America (co-authored with Peter Hansard), The Kama Sutra for Cats (illustrated by Margaret Woodhouse) and Versability, a poetry game similar to Dictionary, where players create new lines for poems rather than new meanings for words (co-authored by his wife Melissa da Souza). His most successful book to date is Why Cats Paint that has sold over 750,000 copies worldwide. He has over one million books in print and been interviewed about them on television in the USA, Germany, and the UK. (The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.")
One of his inventions is the sport of GolfCross, played on a golf course with aerial goal-nets and a golf ball in the shape of a rugby ball. There are Golfcross courses in France, Germany, Argentina, Scotland, England, Ireland, and New Zealand.
Silver's last project (co-authored with Martin O'Connor) was a relationship book titled "Everything He Hasn't Told You Yet: A New Way to Get Men talking About Stuff That Matters". The book uses the Scenario Method that works by putting a man at the center of hypothetical situations thus allowing him to share what he really thinks and feels. Everything He Hasn't Told You Yet was released in the United States in October 2007. The book received a starred review in the Library Journal
Silver has also developed "The Fringe Games" (Fringe Games-Christchurch, New Zealand) which is an international festival of new and experimental sports designed to run in conjunction with the Olympic Games.
He lives with his wife near Martinborough in New Zealand and is currently working on a novel.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
November 22, 2023
Let's start with the cover:
"The Unimaginable Florescence of Feline Fluttering," 2002. Vegetable dye on Aristotle, Persian. Artist: Flavia Venezia, New York
"...An earlier work, "Tortellini per sempre," 2000, which featured an intricate web of delicate pasta patterns on a Cream Tonkinese... was awarded the H.B. Saeed Mohammed Al Paganbani Prize for Decorated Food, in the mistaken belief that Italians eat cats."
Next, let's have a look at an illustration purporting to represent painted cats on postage stamps from the "independent African territory of Ayuba" . A quick Google check confirms that there is no such place (Ayuba is a common family name in Nigeria), and that Things are Not What They Seem.
No matter, as Heather Busch's manipulated photographs are luscious, funny, and really, truly Amazing. Astounding. Fantastic! I can just about guarantee laugh-out-loud moments in the Painted Cat gallery (which is beautifully reproduced). The text is absolutely deadpan, and really, you want to believe in these cats! The book has a sort of hallucinatory shimmer -- you won't know, and likely will never know, whether cats can really be painted...
But perhaps we can judge from the readers comment page [no longer online, alas], which has such plaints as this, from an aspiring cat-painter:
"Unfortunately, trying to carefully control and paint two very willful and in the end very angry cats was an experience akin to swimming freestyle through a very large and thick tangle of blackberry while having buckets of dye thrown at you..."
-- amongst the emails from cat-lovers aghast at the very idea of painting a puss.
So, folks, don't try to paint your cats at home -- leave it to the professionals! Professional Photoshop artists, that is, or so is my reluctant belief.
Let's hope Burton Silver and Heather Busch put together a traveling exhibit of their wonderful photos. In the meanwhile, we shall have to make do with their remarkably entertaining books, which include Why Cats Paint (1994, still my favorite) and Dancing With Cats (1999, astonishingly silly). Do check them out, for even more cat laughs and inspired tomfoolery. Not to be missed.
Review first published at SF Site in 2003. Lightly edited, 2018.
"The Unimaginable Florescence of Feline Fluttering," 2002. Vegetable dye on Aristotle, Persian. Artist: Flavia Venezia, New York
"...An earlier work, "Tortellini per sempre," 2000, which featured an intricate web of delicate pasta patterns on a Cream Tonkinese... was awarded the H.B. Saeed Mohammed Al Paganbani Prize for Decorated Food, in the mistaken belief that Italians eat cats."
Next, let's have a look at an illustration purporting to represent painted cats on postage stamps from the "independent African territory of Ayuba" . A quick Google check confirms that there is no such place (Ayuba is a common family name in Nigeria), and that Things are Not What They Seem.
No matter, as Heather Busch's manipulated photographs are luscious, funny, and really, truly Amazing. Astounding. Fantastic! I can just about guarantee laugh-out-loud moments in the Painted Cat gallery (which is beautifully reproduced). The text is absolutely deadpan, and really, you want to believe in these cats! The book has a sort of hallucinatory shimmer -- you won't know, and likely will never know, whether cats can really be painted...
But perhaps we can judge from the readers comment page [no longer online, alas], which has such plaints as this, from an aspiring cat-painter:
"Unfortunately, trying to carefully control and paint two very willful and in the end very angry cats was an experience akin to swimming freestyle through a very large and thick tangle of blackberry while having buckets of dye thrown at you..."
-- amongst the emails from cat-lovers aghast at the very idea of painting a puss.
So, folks, don't try to paint your cats at home -- leave it to the professionals! Professional Photoshop artists, that is, or so is my reluctant belief.
Let's hope Burton Silver and Heather Busch put together a traveling exhibit of their wonderful photos. In the meanwhile, we shall have to make do with their remarkably entertaining books, which include Why Cats Paint (1994, still my favorite) and Dancing With Cats (1999, astonishingly silly). Do check them out, for even more cat laughs and inspired tomfoolery. Not to be missed.
Review first published at SF Site in 2003. Lightly edited, 2018.
March 8, 2013
Why NOT paint cats? When you have ten grand burning a hole in your pocket and a cat that can sit still for a painting, this book will give you some great ideas from those trailblazers who have gone boldly before you. The Charlie Chaplin painted on the hindquarters of a cat using its a-hole as the bowtie is the Sistine Chapel of feline artistry.
May 28, 2009
Now, compared to Silver's "Dancing with Cats", I did not find this book as funny, however I still highly recommend reading it for a laugh. As a therapist I was especially taken by Egypto-Feline Deification Infusion Training (EDIT for short), a therapeutic model sweeping Arizona in which Egyption rituals with painted cats are used to work out trauma and anxiety (yes, you read that right), i.e. Mary had a problem with her fertility so naturally...
"Exercises included crouching over Casper [the cat painted to be Though, the god of the moon:] and gently pressing her stomach down on him until he brought her symbolic release by creeping out between her legs."
Among the other strange and hilarious this-shit-actually-exists realizations, is the strong ethical component integrated into cat painting. The PAINTING MUST BENEFIT THE CAT. This fact is repeated and examined throughout the book philosophically, wherein we learn about the groups R.A.C.E.S.T. (Raise Awareness of Cats Extra-Sensory Traits) and C.R.O.K. (Cats Rule OK).
Here are some more snippets to whet your appetite for this book:
"Getting it Off: When Cat Painting Goes Wrong"
"When folks see a smiley cat that looks like a feline member of a minstrel show...their first reaction is to say, 'oh how cute' and then they realize that they've just stereotyped the cat in the same limiting way that black people were caricatured by the Minstrels."
"...despite the obvious high standard of the work [it's a tabby painted as a clown:], it's name ["Der Hanswurst", which means 'hand-sausage':], plus the explicit nature of the installation, created a wave of public disapproval when Max appeared in a Bremen gallery playing on a carpet littered with electric dildos. The media savaged the the work as degrading to cats while the critics loved everything about it."
I initially thought I was getting "Why Cats Paint" and did a double take when I realized that this book was actually about rich people who pay a college education's worth of money to have people paint their cats, for stupid reasons (could you conceive of a reasonable excuse for painting a cat?).
Due to the excessive amount paid for this service, I'm more offended than amused. While the cats do look very cool and the art is beautiful, I found the whole matter truly repulsive in it's bougeoise frivolity.
"Exercises included crouching over Casper [the cat painted to be Though, the god of the moon:] and gently pressing her stomach down on him until he brought her symbolic release by creeping out between her legs."
Among the other strange and hilarious this-shit-actually-exists realizations, is the strong ethical component integrated into cat painting. The PAINTING MUST BENEFIT THE CAT. This fact is repeated and examined throughout the book philosophically, wherein we learn about the groups R.A.C.E.S.T. (Raise Awareness of Cats Extra-Sensory Traits) and C.R.O.K. (Cats Rule OK).
Here are some more snippets to whet your appetite for this book:
"Getting it Off: When Cat Painting Goes Wrong"
"When folks see a smiley cat that looks like a feline member of a minstrel show...their first reaction is to say, 'oh how cute' and then they realize that they've just stereotyped the cat in the same limiting way that black people were caricatured by the Minstrels."
"...despite the obvious high standard of the work [it's a tabby painted as a clown:], it's name ["Der Hanswurst", which means 'hand-sausage':], plus the explicit nature of the installation, created a wave of public disapproval when Max appeared in a Bremen gallery playing on a carpet littered with electric dildos. The media savaged the the work as degrading to cats while the critics loved everything about it."
I initially thought I was getting "Why Cats Paint" and did a double take when I realized that this book was actually about rich people who pay a college education's worth of money to have people paint their cats, for stupid reasons (could you conceive of a reasonable excuse for painting a cat?).
Due to the excessive amount paid for this service, I'm more offended than amused. While the cats do look very cool and the art is beautiful, I found the whole matter truly repulsive in it's bougeoise frivolity.
Read
November 24, 2013I loved this book. It is great for the coffee table and definitely a conversation piece.
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November 24, 2009
I first thought this was just a bunch of photos of painted cats, but it turns out that it's much more scholarly than I realized. The photos are accompanied by exploration of various aspects of the ethics and philosophy of cat painting. It also raises some interesting questions like, are cats aware of their color?
Addendum:
After reading some other reviews of this book and doing a little research, I am now aware that this book is a spoof and the "photos" are computer-generated. Bizarre! It has a bibliography and footnotes and everything. I don't feel too bad though since several book reviewers were also operating under the assumption that this was legitimate. I'm sad that there aren't actually amazing artists who paint cats. I guess all the philosophical and ethical arguments still apply to animals in general, but it seems kind of pointless in a way since it's not real...
Addendum:
After reading some other reviews of this book and doing a little research, I am now aware that this book is a spoof and the "photos" are computer-generated. Bizarre! It has a bibliography and footnotes and everything. I don't feel too bad though since several book reviewers were also operating under the assumption that this was legitimate. I'm sad that there aren't actually amazing artists who paint cats. I guess all the philosophical and ethical arguments still apply to animals in general, but it seems kind of pointless in a way since it's not real...
January 3, 2026
Op maandag dinsdag woensdag donderdag vrijdag doen rijke mensen evil, en op zaterdag en zondag doen ze dit.
Maar hey: “A work of cat art MUST benefit or upgrade the cat in some way… the promotion of serious pro-feline messages”
Eerste keer doorbladeren is goed lachje, tweede keer lezen, ik sta perplex. Hier staan legends tussen. Sommige zijn wel beetje peste.
Mn favorites: Bone Voyage, Glory Boy, Hot and Cold, True Blue
Maar hey: “A work of cat art MUST benefit or upgrade the cat in some way… the promotion of serious pro-feline messages”
Eerste keer doorbladeren is goed lachje, tweede keer lezen, ik sta perplex. Hier staan legends tussen. Sommige zijn wel beetje peste.
Mn favorites: Bone Voyage, Glory Boy, Hot and Cold, True Blue
November 25, 2018
Wow. This little book is so longwinded. I think it uses long words just to sound pretentious bringing this book down. If you have a degree in art the book might be more enjoyable. Otherwise just get it fir the pictures. And as a cat person I'm not to keen on using them as the canvas I'd prefer to keep them on the canvas.
February 16, 2025
This was a very niche read about art, ethics and cats. While I felt the art was beautiful, I wanted to hear more about the history of painting cats and the arguments for and against the practice. Also, for context what the process is like for felines. Good book but I wanted more from it!
March 8, 2017
What a wild book. I was astounded by how these cats were transformed. Some of the paintings were a little creepy, but all in all it was very cool. The cats are not being harmed so I say paint away.
December 19, 2020
Similar to "dancing with cats," this highlights the symbiotic relationship between human and feline. The analysis of art is not as in-depth as the prequel, "why cats paint" ;)
December 5, 2009
First of all, I thought this book was ridiculous when I first looked at it. Why would people spend time and money painting cats? Then I looked through it and saw that they had made some pretty cool paintings, and the cats didn't look like they were in pain or pissed off. Give this to the crazy cat lady in your life.
November 20, 2013
If you are in need of a WTF moment, I recommend picking this book up. As the title suggests, this book is all about painting cats. Seriously. And the people featured in this book take their art form very seriously...I just wonder how the cats feel about it...
May 18, 2007
Beautiful artistic book! And the cats are so cute!
July 28, 2007
i give it five for entertainment value.
October 30, 2007
white kitties kick ass.
August 5, 2009
amazing and hilarious book
July 27, 2011
No. Just no.
December 27, 2011
Stunning, gorgeous, amusing, adorable♥
May 1, 2015
nice art book!
July 18, 2013
All cats deserve to be painted. Paint away, cat owners. Paint away.
April 1, 2016
It's a picture book, just enjoy it.
June 29, 2016
Lovely pictures. It was hard to get the cats to stay still for me to recreate the ideas within, however.
December 5, 2023
I thought this was real, but after looking into it more, I realized that it is a satire/humor book. 🤦🏼♀️ haha. Still enjoyable and fun/creative images of cats.
July 15, 2007
...well, kind of non-fiction. A lot of fun to browse through.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews