Every work of art, which thus intends to be understood, necessarily involves a producer pole and a receiver pole. This makes this kind of object, endowed with definite structural properties, which allow, but coordinate the set of interpretations, an ambiguous element that contains, on the one hand, an intentional process in its creation and, on the other hand, the idea of its reception by someone. Considering that aesthetic communication develops roughly in the "expedient-message-percipient" course, or, in other words, that the artist produces, encodes a message, a sign to be received, decoded by the public, this communication only can be effected if the context of the communicator and that of the receiver have something in common. This means not only that there must be a connection for aesthetic communication to play its role, but also that when one does not recognize the message as a message, there is no such communication. Now, as a sign, a work of art can be thought in syntactic, semantic and pragmatic terms. The first concerns the "linguistic" aspect of the work, i.e., how it is structured by its author; the second refers to the "referential" aspect of the work, i.e. what, in Eco's terminology (1989), refers to the "field of interpretive possibilities" provided by the author; the third, finally, refers to the way in which the receiver employs the work presented to him or her. This does not mean anything else but if, according to Ingarden (1973), a work of art is "a very complex structured object at which we direct ourselves in a manifold of interconnected conscious acts and other experiences”, an artwork, as a sign, should not be thought only in terms of its construction (Syntactics), but also what it means (Semantics) and what we, as sign's "users", can do with it (Pragmatics). Well, if we consider a classical poetic, in Aristotelian terms, these three aspects made up a unity, ie a unity in syntactic (construction of the "myth", so to speak), semantic (what it portrays) and pragmatic (for which it was intended, e.g., in the case of Aristotelian tragedy, to the purging of feelings) terms. However, with the dissolution of a stable communicational universe, with the recognition and appreciation of the heterogeneity of the public, with the crisis of the structures of professorial power, dogmatic, administrator of indisputable truths, with the substitution of the "lesson" for "discussion" ( Eco), modernity accompanied a change in the very phenomenon of aesthetic communication; a change that had its beginning already in the 17th and 18th centuries, but that had its apex only from the 20th century; a change that consists, above all, in the fact that, how an artwork must mean concerns the author (which structures it), but what it can mean and how it can be used, concerns the receiver (which interprets it). The present paper aims to analyze the change in the process of constitution and reception of a work of art as a sign.