Exploitative

Does the highlighted "exploitative" mean 1. the artist has shown unreal things in order to gain fame, or simply 2. exaggerated?

Context:

He received commissions from both the British and the Canadians, executing A Canadian Gun Pit (1918) for Canada3 and, slightly later, completing a similar, slightly smaller but more typically vorticist work, A Battery Shelled (1918–1919), for the British. Both drew on a visit of December 1917 to Vimy Ridge in France, the
site of a crucial Canadian victory the previous April. Lewis suggested that the Canadian commission demanded a representative work; it is certainly descriptive, like most of the large Canadian canvases. The other piece reduces soldiers to automatons in a scene of overall destruction – far more in keeping with British hopes for more avant-garde work. Soldiers may well have identified with the detailed gun pit in the Canadian piece, but the British work showed what war did to them. Nevertheless, this latter piece was viewed by some as an exploitative, dehumanizing, and even immoral approach to the subject of real courage in wartime.