Summer 2025 reads: The Fine Art of Persuasion by Professor Gennifer Weisenfeld

For summer 2025, the Duke alumni office assembled a list of thought-provoking works by Duke experts representing multiple disciplines and genres. Anyone seeking a new selection for a book club (or just to engage with the material more deeply as an individual) will be well-served by the five questions each author provided to consider while reading.

One of this year's selections is the newest book by Gennifer Weisenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History: The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan (Duke University Press, 2025). 

See Professor Weisenfeld discuss her work:

From the publisher's description:

Commercial art is more than just mass-produced publicity; it constructs social and political ideologies that impact the public’s everyday life. In The Fine Art of Persuasion, Gennifer Weisenfeld examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic design from the early 1900s through the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a pivotal design event that rebranded Japan on the world stage. 

Through richly illustrated case studies, Weisenfeld tells the story of how modern corporations and consumer capitalism transformed Japan’s visual culture and artistic production across the pre- and postwar periods, revealing how commercial art helped constitute the ideological formations of nation- and empire-building. Weisenfeld also demonstrates, how under the militarist regime of imperial Japan, national politics were effectively commodified and marketed through the same mechanisms of mass culture that were used to promote consumer goods. 

Using a multilayered analysis of the rhetorical intentions of design projects and the context of their production, implementation, and consumption, Weisenfeld offers an interdisciplinary framework that illuminates the importance of Japanese advertising design within twentieth-century global visual culture.