When looking at paintings, we are primed to fill in the narrative of the painting. “Interpretation is a process of accrual in which past experiences merge with evidence of the canvas to construct meaning” (84). Depending on our knowledge and prior experience, we might produce misreadings of the painting (66). “The rhetorical meaning of a painting, then, appears to depend on perception and reception. Prior knowledge and the context of viewing the object will condition perception. Reception depends not only on emotion and structures of feeling, but also on the framing devices and cultural expectations being created by the area of display” (84).
In addition to the physical frame of the painting, “language-based acts create ‘frames’ for viewing art” (68). She calls these “narrative framing devices” (69). “A rhetorical reading, then, engages the spatial and the temporal” (69). However, these narratives bring in “the question of authority: whose narrative?...[T]his question has real consequences for the position of the spectator in relation to the art on display” (69).