ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Visual Communication
Art for art's sake? The influence of art framing and context on the evaluation of immoral behaviour
Provisionally accepted
Itay Goetz1*
Lara Bernhardt2Friederike Margareta Karg1
Alexander (Sasha) Pastukhov2
Claus-Christian Carbon2*- 1University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
- 2Otto-Friedrich-Universitat Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
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Abstract (max 250 words) Artists often challenge societal norms through their artworks; hence, red lines have notoriously been crossed throughout art history. This is particularly the case since the Renaissance, when artists were emancipated from craftspeople and began challenging beholders regarding visual habits, religious and ethical norms. Because artworks possess a special status in our society, they are processed qualitatively differently from everyday life objects. Hence, they offer the opportunity for dialogue, disentangled from automatic evaluative heuristics and strict categories. We tested how labeling visual depictions of immoral acts as art versus non-art affects the overall evaluation of such depictions. Furthermore, we explored the impact of presenting pictures in a physical art gallery on such evaluations. Participants (N=140) were allocated into one of three viewing conditions: art-gallery, art-online, and non-art-online, where the same set of 20 pictures was presented. The pictures evoked similar adverse emotional reactions when shown as art and non-art, including in the gallery. Nevertheless, regarding beauty, interest and happiness rates, the pictures were evaluated higher when labelled art and even higher when presented in the gallery. Additionally, participants reported lower understanding rates and higher surprise rates for the art-labelled pictures, perhaps indicating that people were less likely to immediately apply standard heuristics and categorization routines when processing them. We conclude that art, especially when presented in typical art contexts, provides special conditions that invite beholders to challenge, adapt, and extend their habits. Art may offer a unique context for engaging with extreme or novel ideas, inviting reflection and even transformation.
Keywords: Art appreciation, ethics and aesthetics, Museum effect, context, framing
Received: 16 Jul 2025; Accepted: 17 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Goetz, Bernhardt, Karg, Pastukhov and Carbon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Itay Goetz, itay.goetz@uni-bamberg.de
Claus-Christian Carbon, ccc@uni-bamberg.de
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