Robert Scott Horning wrote:
To me, reproductions of 2D art, especially when it is the entire artwork that is reproduced even in reduced resolution, essentially reproduced the entire artwork. The only legitimate "fair-use" example I have seen for this that has been accepted in U.S. common law is for a thumbnail gallery, such as is done on google images. And even then it is to provide a link to content that appears elsewhere that is legal to use. Usage of this kind of content in a Wikipedia article just doesn't seem to fit the same sort of criteria, and requires multiple clicks to get to the "original" image and information about the actual copyright owner of the photo.
Reproducing artwork and other cultural artifacts for scholarly commentary is pretty well established, and is done literally thousands of times per year in academic journals. Heck, a recent journal article I read [http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/montfort] even reproduced the entire source code of the 1977 Atari game _Combat_ as part of its commentary. It's not as if this is some sort of amazing new use that we're the first to discover.
-Mark