A propagandist’s guide to twenty-first-century image literacy

The recent attempt to write the ‘History of AIDS’ in the midst of an ongoing pandemic has helped solidify media storytelling that paints institutional frameworks as receptive to dissent, proof ‘the system works’ with little indication of who it works for. In this context, the canon of political art that came out of ACT UP New York is re-deployed in support of an intricate ecosystem of power narratives that has triggered a second AIDS crisis, a crisis of remembering, and it has tipped artists, activists, and archivists into a historiological tailspin. Still, if the images created for the AIDS activist movement effectively ‘branded’ the resistance to institutional power, what insights can they provide into the 2016 American election, a moment seized by a candidate less interested in running the country than in running a brand, one constructed on the complex sleight-of-hand of social media and the increasingly permeable border between the commons and the images we use to represent it?