La enfermedad del arte (o al revés, no sé...)

"Art images for the cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases are selected for communication effectiveness, audience appeal, artistic quality, stylistic continuity, and technical reproducibility. Art is drawn from many periods (ancient to contemporary) to "humanize" and enhance the scientific content by creating order and harmony, showing chaos, revealing truth, raising consciousness, immortalizing, surprising, fantasizing, illustrating ideas, stimulating the intellect, and firing the emotions."

Left: Munch, Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu

Art images for the cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases are selected for communication effectiveness, audience appeal, artistic quality, stylistic continuity, and technical reproducibility. Art is drawn from many periods (ancient to contemporary) to "humanize" and enhance the scientific content by creating order and harmony, showing chaos, revealing truth, raising consciousness, immortalizing, surprising, fantasizing, illustrating ideas, stimulating the intellect, and firing the emotions.

The cover text has evolved literally by popular demand-out of the journal readership's desire to know what the cover means, how it relates to them and to what they do. Over the years, a set formula for writing the cover text was developed that seems to work well with the audience and not interfere with production deadlines; it is a brief sketch of the artist, period, artistic topic, and infectious disease relevance. The reader looks for the brief explanation in the same place, is accustomed to the easy style, expects to be guided through the art work, and in the end is surprised and, we hope, enlightened.

"About the Cover" is not an exhaustive or authoritative discussion of the painting or the painter. It is a brief opinion feature located after "News and Notes" as part of the journal's effort to be a communication tool, not an archive of science.

Emerging Infectious Diseases is not about art. The journal has a cover to protect the scientific content from the elements. But as a communication tool, art seems to work. Our readers enjoy the covers. We don't know exactly why. But as Georges Braque once said, "There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain."

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/cover_images/covers.htm