As anyone working in communications, marketing, or public relations in the art world will attest, it's extremely difficult to enforce institutional rules governing image reproduction. Catalogue covers, street banners, brochures, and advertising campaigns routinely break reproduction taboos, making liberal use of full bleeds, crops, superimpositions, drop-outs, details, and overprinting.
Editors cite in-house editorial style when they cut credit lines.
Designers crop and overprint images for the creative wallop and visual impact. It's hard to make a case for preserving the integrity of images when, for example, one's own museum Web site presents art work that is animated, changes colors, vaporizes, or alternates dizzyingly with other images, and museum shops commission neckties and mouse pads based upon signature works. The rules governing the use of images were once ironclad. It had to be so noted in the credit line and the full image had to appear somewhere within the printed piece. The language in AFA contracts with museums presenting AFA exhibitions is specific.