ABSTRACT
The statistical picture of AIDS as a borderless global epidemic is no less appalling to artists than it is to epidemiologists. The inevitable deadliness of the syndrome has been repeatedly challenged by artists to whom medicine has handed down a death sentence along with an AIDS diagnosis. On December 1,1989, a handful of New York galleries marked World AIDS Day by draping artworks in black or by removing them temporarily from public view. The allegory of Death the Censor is hardly new in Western culture. Pre-AIDS versions of it can be traced back to the plague-haunted tradition of the macabre in late medieval and Renaissance iconography. In 1988, the Metro Area Committee on AIDS, based in Halifax, published a safer sex poster that celebrated the aesthetic pleasures of voyeurism, conveyed a homoerotically charged message, and featured full-frontal male nudity.
