A very stimulating challenge

 

I find very stimulating the challenge related to the Semiotics of Cultural Heritage.  The accent on selection involves a critical attitude towards the increasing amount of works of all kinds, which have to face our reaction as a choice among acceptance and rejection. As a matter of fact, it may happen and it happens effectively that we have to adopt a third attitude; some works are neither rejected, nor preserved in their initial version, they are transformed, compressed, rewritten according to the requirements imposed  by various historical evolutions.

 

A simple problem of transfer?

 

At a first glance, preserving the cultural heritage (CH) may give impression to be a simple problem of transfer from past to present of some works of cultural value. The first trap in this respect is to become prisoner of anything which is located in the past and to believe that just this fact motivates its preservation.

But a descriptive, additive representation of CH, seen as an inventory of works whose cultural value, once established (in many cases with weak critical attitude), remains the same for ever, is not plausible for several reasons.

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