Aristic License II

Visual Signals

With apologies to repeating these ungainly, ungraceful and distasteful posters once again, but since this is a blog concerned with visual codes, Anne Kingston's book cover design needs revisiting.

Just her like apparently confused and confusing messages in her book - to those who are not aware of her real negative messages - Kingston tries to coat her image with what looks like wit and visual appeal.

But in reality, none of that exists in her image.

The most eyecatching effect is the Tiffany blue (after the beautiful gift boxes from the famous gift and jewellery store Tiffany and Co.). Kingston’s theme is that brides-to-be spend too much money on their wedding and beyond, wanting to set up a Cinderella type story. She’s blaming the marketing side of marriage. If that is her case, why not help these future brides with a ‘how to’ or ‘how not to’ book rather than spend these hundreds of pages sidetracking onto the negativities of marriage?

But, there is a more macabre side to this. The Tiffany blue is also a celestial or heavenly blue. Kingston is saying that desiring that marriage be holy and blessed is only a fantasy - like dreaming of buying Tiffany diamonds.

This is further corroborated with the halo around the central image, once again ironically and insultingly denigrating the sacredness of this institution.

I surmised all of this by how she represented not the ‘fourth’ finger, but the whole arm below the necessary hand.

In fact, what that image mimics is the Black Panther Fist of Glory, only the reverse side.

The movie poster, in all its innocence, just picked up on the profanity.

Kingston’s message is far more radical and violent. Her’s is a war waged not only on marriage, but on institutions that she in her apparently skewed right-wing view point sees as oppressing and worth destroying.

For all her rhetoric at the right inclining National Post, Kingston is a leftist at heart, and now has tied herself closely to the far left.

Is this what 21st century feminism looks like - a return to violence?

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