Taken from The Poetics of the Open Work - Umberto Eco.
All these examples of "open" work and "works in movement" have this latent characteristic which guarentees that they will always be seen as "works" and not just as a conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from the chaos in which they previously stood and permitted to asume any form whatsoever. Now, a dictionary clearly presents us with thousands upon thousands of which we could freely use to compose poetry, essays on physics, annonymous letters, or grocery lists. In this sense the dictionary is clearly open to the reconstruction of it's raw material in any way that the manipulator wishes. But this does not make it a "work" . The "opennesss and dynamism of an artistic work consists in factors which make make it susceptable to a whole range of integrations. They provide it wioth organic complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete. The structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it admits all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it.
