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of words which we could freely use to compose poetry, essays on physics, anonymous letters, or grocery lists. In this sense the dictionary is clearly open to the reconstitution of its raw material in any way that the manipulator wishes. But this does not make it a 'work'. The 'openness' and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make it susceptible to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete. This structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it admits of all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it.
1.6.
The preceding observations are necessary because, when we speak of a work of art, our Western aesthetic tradition forces us to take 'work' in the sense of a personal production which may well vary in the ways it can be received but which always maintains a coherent identity of its own and which displays the personal imprint that makes it a specific, vital, and significant act of communication. Aesthetic theory is quite content to conceive of a variety of different poetics, but ultimately it aspires to general definitions, not necessarily dogmatic or sub specie aeternitatis, which are capable of applying the category of the 'work of art' broadly speaking to a whole variety of experiences, which can range from the Divine Comedy to, say, electronic composition based on the different permutations of sonic components.
We have, therefore, seen that (i) 'open' works, insofar as they are in movement, are characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the author and that (ii) on a wider level (as a subgenus in the species 'work in movement') there exist works which, though organically completed, are 'open' to a continuous generation of internal relations which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of perceiving the totality of incoming stimuli. (iii) Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance.
Contemporary aesthetics has frequently pointed out this last characteristic of every work of art. According to Luigi Pareyson:
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The work of art . . . is a form, namely of movement, that has been concluded; or we can see it as an infinite contained within finiteness. . . . The work therefore has infinite aspects, which are not just 'parts' or fragments of it, because each of them contains the totality of the work, and reveals it according to a given perspective. So the variety of performances is founded both in the complex factor of the performer's in-

 
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