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Burton Silver and Heather Busch, authors of the 1994 coffee table book Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics, managed to pull off the double feat of creating a sly and hilarious send-up of both art books and cat books. Example: As San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Jon Carroll observed in his review of the work at the time of its original release: As Carroll predicted, a good many people did take Why Cats Paint at face value and failed to realize it was a spoof. The phenomenon was repeated with the 2002 release of Why Paint Cats: The Ethics of Feline Aesthetics — whereas the focus of the former book was cats as painters, the subject of the latter was cats as canvases, a topic that led some readers (who again mistakenly took the book literally instead of humorously) to be concerned about the propriety and potentially harmful effects of artists' painting designs directly onto cats' fur (as noted by reviewer Suzanne Hively of the Cleveland Plain Dealer): The joke lives on, as several photographs from the latter book were circulated via e-mail (without any explanatory context) as examples of real painted cats. They're all manipulated images taken from Why Paint Cats, however (although some versions of the e-mail may include similar images from other sources as well).
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