Are ICOMOS’s founding doctrinal texts living or dead documents?

Louis Cloquet, a Belgian engineer, drew a sharp distinction in 1901 between living monuments — those that "have a present life and must adapt to their use" — and dead monuments, which "belong to the past and can only claim to survive as memories of bygone eras ". It is a distinction he applied to buildings. But what about the documents that govern their fate?
Over the past fifteen years, ICOMOS's doctrinal texts have come under sustained fire. The creation of the Asoociation of Critical Studies in 2011 gave institutional muscle to what Laurajane Smith had already diagnosed in 2006 as the "authorised heritage discourse" — a body of expert-driven, top-down thinking increasingly at odds with approaches to living heritage. Are these founding charters still alive? Or have they quietly become the very thing they were written to protect against — monuments to a faded consensus? This short presentation uses the Venice and Burra Charters as contrasting test cases to ask: can ICOMOS's doctrinal texts still breathe?