Abstract
More than 50 years after its original appearance in Italian, The Open Work remains significant for its powerful concept of "openness" - the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance - and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.