Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong - Caroline Casey

There's something perverse about making a traditional paper book about Internet ephemera: committing material that is readily available at the public's fingertips for free to ink and paper and a $16.95 price point. But so, too, is there something perverse about owning — and loving — a cat: being enamored of an imperious and mysterious creature that almost always seems to care less about us than we do about it, but remains compelling and adorable all the same.

It's precisely this kind of ambivalent-yet-appealing perversity that makes the anthology "Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong," an entire book of essays dedicated to cat videos, such a delight.

The editors of the project, Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach and Sarah Schultz of the Minneapolis-based Coffee House Press, have a sense of humor about their undertaking, thankfully. To wit: the book was funded in part by a "Catstarter" campaign, and this reviewer's copy arrived with a complimentary "Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong" laser pointer. Yet while they don't attempt to overly academicize their admittedly idiosyncratic subject, the editors are ambitious about its aims, writing in the introduction that "(i)t's about the boundaries of what art is, about spectacle and the communal and the personal, and about all of the places those things overlap."

The book was produced in partnership with the Walker Art Center, where the editors experienced the first Internet Cat Video Festival, about which they observe that "there's something about experiencing a phenomenon and pleasure particular to the (I)nternet, offline." That pleasure exists in each of these essays by 14 writers, including such well-known essayists as Ander Monson and Elena Passarello, as well as such Internet cat experts as Will Braden, whose "Henri 2, Paw de Deux" Roger Ebert called "the best (I)nternet cat video ever made," and Kevin Nguyen, a former content manager at I Can Has Cheezburger?

Lest it descend into redundancy, as can happen with lesser anthologies, this book offers a variety of lenses through which to view cat videos, including the historical. In "East of Intention: Cat, Camera, Music," Carl Wilson points out that humans' fixation with filming cats goes back to Thomas Edison's early short "Boxing Cats," and "(e)ven earlier, if you count Eadweard Muybridge's flipbook-style photographic animal locomotion studies in the 1880s."

Through these lenses, the authors explore some pretty big questions: Why do cat videos matter? Why does art matter? Why does anything — taste, technology, cuteness — matter? Each seems to arrive at the convincing conclusion that there's a lot to be learned about our own humanity — in all its admirability and ridiculousness — through our fascination with goofy films about our feline counterparts. Or as Maria Bustillos writes in "Hope is the Thing With Fur," cats "share, somehow, our central predicament. Beauty and panic, laziness, and the potential for real idiocy. A certain predisposition to cruelty and indifference, mixed indiscriminately with a certain unaccountable warmth and gentleness. … What we can but dimly apprehend of our own condition, we can readily see and identify in cats."

Jillian Steinhauer's "The Nine Lives of Cat Videos" is another standout for its easy blend of erudition and conversationality. She cites John Berger's "Why Look at Animals?" and Pauline Kael's "Trash, Art, and the Movies," in which Kael offers the "simple, good distinction that all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art," not to mention Guy Debord and Theodor Adorno as she muses on the distinction between that which distracts us and that which makes us think.

As is the case with the best creative nonfiction, these essayists allow room for ambivalence and ambiguity. The book is not afraid to be critical, touching on concerns about "catsploitation" and the fact that some people actually don't like cat videos, inclining instead to view them as insubstantial and time-wasting.

Editor Sarah Schultz's essay, which ends the book, though, leaves the reader with a positive assessment of the Internet Cat Video Festival that kicked this endeavor off: "After all, it isn't about watching cat videos. It is about watching cat videos together." There's something touching and hopeful in this affection for the chance to focus on what we share as opposed to what divides us, and that shared affection makes "Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong" a diverting read.