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Sunday, October 24th, 2010 06:02 pm (UTC)
One issue is that it usually is possible to talk about fanfic pretty clearly just by describing and quoting it - whereas "quoting" art is almost always going to involve showing it, just because the way we understand visual images is different than the way we understand text.

That's one reason why I want art (and other images that are far less controversial, like for example screenshots, banners, icons, promo pictures, etc.) on the article pages, also because it looks much better with art than without. However, documenting art by describing it is no more difficult that documenting a story by describing it, and showing doesn't have to mean showing the whole image. When I want to talk about Spock's alien genitalia I could show a thumbnail of his double-ridged penis from one of Gayle F's works, I wouldn't have to show the whole image. Showing just the penis? That would be quoting a piece of art.

If I want more (and I do! I want so much more! I LOVE fanart!!!), I need to consider that by uploading an image to Fanlore the wiki is archiving that image. Uploading a piece of fanart I copied from another page (That's a different situation than taking a photo or making a scan of something you own; creating the digital file to begin with) is uploading a piece of fanart to an archive. And Fanlore functions in this regard like most archives. You can browse the wiki by fandom categories and just click on the images you like to see the full-size version of. From there you can follow a link to a page where the image is used, but you don't have to. You can just admire the art, maybe save it to your computer, then return to the fandom category and pick the next image to watch, all that without ever clicking on any text pages. If it works like an archive, it should follow the fannish norms about archiving someone's work (in most cases that means getting permission when you use the digital file the artist created on another archive).

Fanart isn't just something you can grab to illustrate a point (any point, apparently it's okay as long as it's not completely pointless), it's also a fanwork. And as such it should be treated like a fanwork.

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