This article presents a research and evaluation approach centered on artistic activity and the learning it generates: it challenges a more or less consciously imposed limit to the recognition of people with disabilities as artists carrying out an authentic aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1934). A validist a priori holds that when it comes to people institutionally identified as living with an intellectual disability, the artistic activities proposed to them are most often motivated by prescriptions with therapeutic or social intentions, presupposing a hypothetical transfer of the benefits of the artistic practice into other domains of their existence: their behaviour, their social participation, their “well-being”, etc. Although the benefits that artistic activity brings to every human being are not disputable, to be restricted at this general appreciation for these people deprives them from the outset of access to recognition as artists through the fact that their practice is instrumentalized for externalized purposes.