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The relation between social workers and art is more cultural than artistic. Taking this as their starting point, the authors show that, when art is dissolved into cultural discourse, this becomes an obstacle to understanding its specificity, its autonomous nature, and its opposition to the social arena (as shown by Adorno). The authors propose that social work should take into account the vast domain covered by the science of esthetics, and include this within its own field of epistemology, which is in the process of being constructed. This argument is illustrated by two projects undertaken with social workers in training courses. In the first, artistic resources are used to analyze objects that appear in social interventions. The second looks towards a renewal of research by taking into account visual forms of knowledge.