Kinda proud of this:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=40377
As your first reply I’ll second the emotion for a third time.
Since this is Great Debates, either of you have a cite for this? I could believe it pretty easily, but that’s not the same thing as knowing. I guess I could get a cat and try it out…if I moved somewhere that would permit them…on second thought, I don’t want to know that bad.
I doubt there’s a linkable “cite,” Dijon; I don’t think the book has spawned any conspiracy sites. But if you read the book there’s really no attempt to suggest that it’s documentary evidence of cats painting; it’s a funny book, and that’s all: the cats are in costumes, or at least in little fake studio sets, if I remember. It’s kind of along the same lines as “French for Cats,” and no I don’t have a cite proving that cats don’t speak French.
In any case, if you were to dip a cat’s paws in paint and get him to scramble over a painting, a book about the resulting “paintings” would itself be the art, with the presentation of the “found art” of the cat’s scrambling being the point at which they crossed the not-art/art barrier. (Gaudere covered this rather eloquently above.)
The cat paintings just look wrong for true naive art. Works done by children, mental patients, mentally retarded persons and aristic “outsiders” look distinctly different than works done by people attempting to ghost that style. If you’ve ever tried to do a piece that looks like a child did it, or write like a child, it is impossible, in my experience, to make it really look like a child’s work. When you study art more-or-less formally, you can shortcut to knowledge of proportions and composition through study rather than laboriously working through it. However, this shortcut has its price; you start painting things the way they “should” look instead of truly seeing them. It is an interesting paradox that training is necessary to make truly bad, dead art. Art done by people without any training or study or knowledge of art can be poorly proportioned, with bad composition or hideous color usage…but it’s always alive.
“Once I drew like Raphael but it has taken me a lifetime to draw like a child.” – Pablo Picasso
“I wish I had been born blind in order to gain my sight and be able to paint objects without knowing what they were.” --Claude Monet
Anyhow, the cat paintings are just too “dead” to have been done by an animal, IMHO; too neat, too tidy, too many unspoken assumptions about what art “should” look like. They are painted like someone attempting to paint like a cat, and not in the manner that a creature without any artistic training would paint. So I do not believe they were truly done by cats.