Structures as Argument: The Visual Persuasiveness of Museums and Places of Worship

Structures as Argument assesses museums, places of worship, monuments, and cemetery stones as means of visual persuasion. It argues that structures are equally capable of influencing viewers as speeches or advertisements are and that to miss this essential feature of them is to fail in understanding their cultural roles. The book spotlights museums ranging from such cultural icons as the Louvre and the British Museum, to such museums of collective memory as the Anne Frank House, to museums of pure visual persuasion such as the Doge s Palace in Venice. It features places of worship which range from Notre-Dame de Paris, to the Spanish missions of San Antonio, Texas, to the Protestant churches of America and includes a chapter on non-Western structures such as Chinese museums and Buddhist temples. Structures as Argument makes a significant contribution to the theory of persuasion, visual communication, and art history. It utilizes a theory of visual signs developed by Paul Messaris out of the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce. In so doing, it demonstrates that artifacts of war, cathedral iconography, positioning of art objects for effect, and the art of gravestone sculpture all may be thought of in terms of means of social influence. 'Structures as Argument: The Visual Persuasiveness of Museums and Places of Worship edited by J. Donald Ragsdale opens a novel way to view and interact with structures that most people have grown to take for granted. Museums and places of worships are reframed as much more than containers of people and artifacts. Rather, readers are asked to consider the designers of the containers and the arrangers of their interiors as very smart strategists with messages to put forward; and to consider ourselves as members of their audience. Thus those structures may be to their audience a cultural icon, or a polemic or a reminder of collective memory or a partisan advocate or finally an exercise in pure visual persuasion. Ragsdale and his co-authors furnish detailed and fascinating commentary on the likes of otherwise familiar structures (taken in order): the Louvre, the museum at Dachau, the Ann Frank House, the Tate Modern, and the Sistine Chapel and many others. With this skeleton in place the chapters in Structures as Argument flesh out the thesis contained in the title by extending and applying it to museums of natural history plus their iterations on their websites and to European gothic cathedrals, Spanish missions of the American southwest, the contemporary protestant church scene and to nonwestern manifestations of this same rhetorical impulse. Throughout their whole treatment, Ragsdale and his co-authors employ the elaborated likelihood model of Petty and Cacioppo (1985) to demonstrate how structures take the peripheral route into our awareness, depending on music, light, color, scent, and other such mood-inducing forms . . . [that are] not to be thought about critically but rather to be felt or experienced directly . . . . In short, the book prepares one to see the museum or place of worship with new eyes and to be wary of their builders persuasive designs. Richard L. Conville, Professor, Department of Speech Communication, The University of Southern Mississippi