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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (March 13, 2015)
Street Roots • March 13-19, 2015 CA TS, fro m page 10 News for a rhinoplasty surgeon. “Were the Betacam videos for fun or for art? They are the same to me. It wasn’t for sharing. It was just for me.” When the technology became available to digitize his disintegrating Beta tapes, he decided to keep Keyboard Cat for posterity and to amuse his daughter. YouTube had just launched; a friend suggested he post the clip there. “I didn’t really know what YouTube was. It was like the Internet was ready; the cat was already way ahead of the times,” Schmidt reflects. “The fact that ssot going arem si saving there’s some success l i b Is Ila® a r t Fm saying l i e and income based on festival Is an interesting just doing something eiperfeae® that 1 th in k does that I wanted to do, fa ll lu te the art realm el I’m really glad about experiences. A rt should delight that. “It reinforces me and dialleage« I t shonld make making a r t It makes yew mad sometimes, and most me want to make of a ll It should make yew think». more. It’s been just a Oood art does a ll those things/ totally all-round great experience. I’ve and a lo t of these videos are learned so much, llfce th a t/* something exciting and ~~ SCOTT STOLEN new every day. I live in F O U N D E R O F T H E IN T E R N E T Nowheresville ' C A T V ID E O F E S T IV A L (Spokane, Wash.), and the Internet helps distribute my stuff globally from my dining room table. That’s fantastic.” thousands” of cat videos. “There are more people trying to make a cat video that goes viral than ever before. But I’m. convinced there is no magic formula. You can’t manufacture it,” he says. Like Schmidt, Stulen comes from a fine- art background. He had worked in museums for 10 years as a curator and educator when he and Katie Hill, an intern who worked alongside him at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, dreamed up the Internet Cat Video Festival in 2012 as “a fun way to close the summer,” getting folks together in an open space beside the gallery to watch much loved funny cats and, like Cannes or Sundance, award prizes for the best. “We had no expectation of it becoming as large as it did,” Stulen says. “We thought maybe a couple of hundred people would show up.” They circulated a press release drawing attention to their cute juxtaposition of high art versus low (museum versus cats), and within three hours, they were being interviewed by the L.A. Times. The estimate of 500 visitors upped to 1,500, then 5,000. “In the end, 10,000 showed up, and we had all this residual traffic of people buying from the shop, buying tickets to other events; they went to see our exhibitions,” Stulen says, “It cracked that thing that everybody in the museum context is after — how do you get people to care, how do you change your audience?” Almost immediately, Walker Arts Center received requests to tour CatVidFest. This was a triumph for Stulen. “There was a lot of snobbery, internally at ’■ Unlike more conyentional artists, Schmidt has 8O,0OO unread m e^ ag es at thie ’ the Walkef a ^ j^ ^ ^ ^ n y c rO n ro B n ^ p la c e B . Katie^anH^^nuckTIusTlur^Yiirough. It would not have happened if it wasn’t for us moment. being able to navigate the museum a little Sociologists, psychologists and scientists bit politically and also a little slyly. A lot of have produced reams of research in a bid to curators didn’t want this to happen. If they’d explain why these memes — or fads, like a | known the level it would grow to, it probably video or funny picture, that go viral on the wouldn’t have happened either.” Internet and are shared millions of times — Stulen, who was subsequently are so popular. Why are cats funnier than headhunted and is no longer directly dogs? Why do cats like to squeeze inside involved with CatVidFest but consults for boxes? Why are people compelled to watch Cat-Con, approached the curation of the them over and over and over again and festival from a meticulous, art-critical share them with everyone they know? How perspective. It wasn’t just stuff we fritter can marketing companies hijack these fads hours on at home; clips were carefully and turn their products into a universally edited, a program pieced together, proper loved global phenomenon? filmmakers invited. The most celebrated People who know cat videos best say - was Will Braden, whose moody Henri, Le with no small amount of glee - the simple Chat Noir black-and-white shorts are fact is we can’t really ever answer these beautiful and darkly funny. Braden, who is questions, and marketing types can never now curator of CatVidFest and will also be cook up a surefire hit. in a consumer-testing at Cat-Con, is another “proper artist.” But lab. can cat videos really be called art? “We’ve had clients who’ve said, ‘We’ll just “I’m not going around saying this is fine pay for the rights’ or ‘Get the cat here and art,” Stulen insists. “I’m saying the festival we’ll just shoot it ourselves,’” muses is an interesting experience that I think Schmidt. “I don’t know if you want to try does fall into the art realm of experiences. th a t.... It takes a certain temperament of Art should delight and challenge. It should cat, for sure. You can’t just take a cat and think that it’s going to work. Once in a while make you mad sometimes, and most of all it should make you think. Good art does all they make it look good, but it doesn t look those things, and a lot of these videos are the same.” like that. Scott Stulen, founder of the Internet Cat “Fun doesn’t have to be frivolous, and Video Festival, has watched “tens of Page 11 IA M L IL B U B /W IK IG O M M O N S LU Bub smart doesn’t have to be boring,” he adds. It’s a sentiment echoed by Schmidt (his website states: “I don’t know regular life from art. But I do know that if something is boring and then you call it art, it is Still boring”). This year, the Walker Center’s CatVidFest moves from the museum . to the St. Paul Saints’ , new sports ground. “This is not a lucrativi operation for the Walker,” says Ryan French, director of marketing, when asked ii it’s cashing in on cats. “However, the success is clearly due to the popularity of cat videos. Other festivals based on other video genres have popped up, but none have had this success. This is a weird phenomenon no one predicted would be so popular.” He argues that the art world has been “overwhelmingly supportive of the concept,” and most venues that have booked the tour are art museums or art house cinemas. Audiences comprise “mostly people who enjoy a cat video, whether they know it or not,” plus a few “fanatics who dress up like cats or try to bring their cats” - but mainly it’s people sharing a cheerful experience. And as for sniffy types who think cat videos are beneath them, he says: “Coolness is in the eye of the beholder. The festival has no pretence, it is an incredibly earliest and open experience.” Courtesy o f IN SP News Service www.street- papers.org G A G E S K ID M O R E / W IK IC O M M O N S Grumpy Cat speaking at the 2014 VidCon on June 28, 2014.
