The Los Angeles artist Andrea Bowers made a monumental artwork that she hoped would support the #MeToo movement and presented it, with the help of four galleries, at the prestigious Art Basel fair in Switzerland. Three imposing walls of text and photos made up of 167 red panels retold the stories of men and women who had been accused of sexual misconduct or harassment since the movement began in 2017.

But if the intent of her work, called “Open Secrets Part I & II, 2018, 2019,” was to raise awareness about insensitivity to women, it seemed to backfire when Helen Donahue, a woman who said she had been abused, complained on Twitter last week that photographs of her were used without her consent, and another woman, Abby Carney, said her name had been used without her consent. In a highly unusual move, Ms. Bowers extracted the panel in question, and issued an apology for having used the photographs.

Ethics scholars said the incident at the fair, which closed Sunday , offered a case study in the complexity of creating political art. What rules apply for appropriating images and stories previously posted on personal social media accounts, or allegations made in a journalistic context? As socially conscious art has become increasingly popular, and these works enter galleries and other commercial settings, should moral lines be drawn?

“This is a whole new set of questions,” said Prof. Griselda Pollock, director of the Center for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds in Britain. “Artists have a right to quote from the world, and they have authorization to present it as their art. But if you use materials that come from one context of use, with its own inherent ethics and politics, into another one, then we find that there are people who are challenging it.”