Smithsonian.com

Director cat needs to adjust the composition. Photo: Paul

It is the dawn of a new era. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., played host yesterday to the Internet Cat Video Festival, a celebration of all the hilariously-inane feline-centric films that flood the web. That’s right: a reputable institution has accepted that ridiculous cat videos may count as art.

The center is a serious venue: upcoming exhibitions include more traditional fare such as The Renegades: American Avant-Garde Film, 1960—1973, and The Living Years: Art after 1989. But it opted to open its doors to the nascent field of videos-entirely-devoted-to-the-weird-things-cats-do, a decision that the Associated Press says “tested the boundaries of legitimate art.”

And while the festival started out as a social experiment of sorts, the organizers of the festival told the AP, it became more serious when thousands of submissions started rolling in. In the end, the festival featured  “nine CAT-egories,” the CBC reports, including drama, animated and art house, and those in attendance got to vote for their favorites.

The full list of entries is here, and the videos can be found on YouTube. The festival winner: the delightfully morose chat français, Henri 2, Paw de Deux:

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