Cats on Parade: Did the Ca$hcats.biz Gallery Show Work?

“This is a .biz site, I remind you,” Will Zweigart yelled last night over a pounding, over-modulated Kanye West track. “It’s not .org! Tonight is about .biz!”

Zweigart wasn’t angry, but he seemed slightly — very slightly — indignant. He was talking to Danielle Strle, a Tumblr outreach director, about how he planned the event they were at: “Ca$hcats.biz: How the One Purrcent Really Live.” It was a one-night-only art show, held in Dumbo in Brooklyn, that highlighted images of cats sitting around near currency — and Strle was in awe that Zweigart had put it all together so smoothly.

“I wanted to do it right,” he told her. “I mean, the site is the VIP room for wealthy cats.”

Despite the lack of an ironic wink in his voice, the 33-year-old Zweigart was going for a laugh. But therein lay the awkward — and fascinating — tension at the heart of the event: if something starts as an online joke, but leads to an unprecedented display of craftsmanship and planning, does it deserve to be taken seriously?

A quick bit of background about Ca$hcats.biz, for those who didn’t read our exclusive profile of the site back in June: it’s a straightforward, uncluttered Tumblr that features large images of cats next to money, guns, diamonds, and the like. It’s become something of a phenomenon, with upwards of 55,000 followers and hundreds of submissions from around the planet.

“I talk about it as a model at every [Tumblr] meeting I’m in,” Strle said last night. “It’s an example of everything Tumblr’s good at. It’s got that collaborative element that Tumblr users should go for.”

And with the gallery showing — co-sponsored by Tumblr — the site also set a new bar for Tumblrs everywhere by colonizing the brick-and-mortar universe with original content. It wasn’t just a showcase of existing photos from the site, though many were on display (and at least one person offered to purchase all of them for a lump sum — Zweigart cheerfully refused, saying “If we did that, no one else could buy them”). It was primarily a showing of original artwork, nearly all of which was created by visual artists just for the show.

Portland-based artist Lisa Hildebrant got the ball rolling on the project after she was introduced to the site by a friend. “I’ve never even seen grass grow as fast as this show did,” she recalled, sitting in a windowsill near one of her pieces (a book-cover-sized red-neon-light outline of a cat). “I emailed Will in April to be like, ‘You should do an art show,’ and by June, he’s like, ‘Do you wanna come to Brooklyn?’”

And so it began. Zweigart commissioned his friends from Forced Meme Productions, a small outfit that throws Internet-themed parties, and they helped set it all up. From the beginning, Zweigart envisioned it as a “collaborative” art show, meaning every work in the gallery would be submitted by artists — there would be little to no commissioning or seeking people out.

It was more than a little insane. When Zweigart set the event up, months ago, he only had one piece (a watercolor adaptation of one of the site’s pictures, painted by Hildebrant). And yet, the submissions rolled in. Not only that, but the event reached maximum capacity for RSVPs — 900 people. And that was without any advertising outside of posts on the site and the site’s Facebook page.

The vibe in the high-ceilinged, wooden-floored space was like any other gallery showing: mellow, yet filled with people engaged with the content. Everyone looked the way you might expect: twenty- and thirty-somethings in hipster business-casual, nursing beers and giggling.

As mentioned before, Kanye was the musician of choice for the DJs, a duo calling themselves Silent Drape Runners. “Kanye is a cash cat,” said Russ Marshalek, one half of the act. “There are two kinds of one-percenters: the ones you want to hang out with and the ones you don’t. Romney is one you don’t want to hang with. These cats are ones you do, and same goes for Kanye.”

He wasn’t the only one bringing up politics. Nic Rad, a Brooklyn artist who created one of the show’s more popular pieces (a painting of a smug-looking anthropomorphized cat standing amidst money and holding a copy of Atlas Shrugged) made a comparison between cats and right-wingers: “They act as though the society around them hasn’t created the conditions for them to thrive,” he said. (Please note, reader, that that is an entirely accurate description of 90% of cats.)

Even gun-control came up. Kit Garcia, an acupuncturist and painter from Austin, made a two-panel piece called “Calico vs. Calico,” featuring a calico cat on one side and a Calico M960 submachine gun (which is illegal to manufacture) on the other. But most of the pieces were relatively non-ideological: a taxidermied kitten batting at a mobile of dollar bills, a portrait of fellow Tumblr sensation Pusheen the cat, a stained-glass window of a cat basking in the holy glory of money, and so on.

Attendee response was overwhelmingly positive, with many putting down healthy bids on the silent auctions for the pieces. “I love that it’s the Internet, IRL,” said Leah Taylor, who was vying hard to snag a piece entitled “$25 Pussies.”

There were some haters, as there always are in anything Internet-related. “It’s wall decor,” said one cynical attendee — who, unlike many others there, said she was a regular gallery-goer. “They’re all very enthusiastic about making Etsy art, I guess. I’m not sure Internet memes translate to art.”

Arguably, she was missing the point of the show. But wait, what was the point of the show? Sure, the silent auction and merch sale raised thousands of dollars for the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition… but that was a nice byproduct, rather than the inspiration, for the show.

In a way, it seemed as though the show was — intentionally or not — an experiment. All the fans at the show had the giddy, cheerful energy of fetishists who show up at a meet-up for fellow lovers of their particular kink: no one was quite sure how well this private experience would work in a public setting. And sure, it wasn’t a MoMA showing, but everything felt professional, smooth, and not at all lost in translation to the physical realm. And unlike the magical gatherings of ROFLCon, this wasn’t a gathering about the Internet — just one inspired by it, one that existed on its own.

“I’m not sure what’s next,” an exhausted but cheery Zweigart said as the event closed out. “But I’m pretty sure the 99% won’t allow this status quo to continue.” Obviously, it was a teaser for a new permutation of Cashcats, perhaps one riffing on populism, rather than opulence. And obviously, it was born of online light-heartedness. But if you put labor and artistry into something, the ironic vibe of its origins doesn’t really matter, does it?