Abstract. — In this talk I argue that our engagement in debates about art can be fruitfully understood along the same lines as debates in conceptual engineering. Proposals in conceptual engineering are not to be evaluated on the basis of their ability to track empirical essences but on the basis of a concept’s epistemic, pragmatic, or political merits. In the same way, we should view membership in the category ‘work of art’ as well as subcategories such as ‘folk art’ and ‘sculpture’ not as a fact to be discovered but a decision to be made. I flesh out this core idea by describing a normativist account of aesthetic terms, according to which our terms do not function to “pick out” properties in the world but enable speakers to convey, endorse, and negotiate semantic and behavioral norms. I conclude by showing how this parallel understanding of art and conceptual engineering sheds light on more general issues for conceptual engineers, such as the role of power in the legitimization of new concepts and philosophical questions.