Introduction Umberto Eco’s The Open Work is one of the most influential critical texts of the twentieth century, redefining how we understand the relationship between an artist, a text, and its audience. While many know Eco as the novelist behind The Name of the Rose, he was first and foremost a brilliant semiotician—a thinker deeply concerned with how meaning is created and shared. In classical art, the artist acts as a dictator, shaping every detail to control how the audience interprets...