In my paper, I propose regarding the acts of production behind airport (tourist) art as cultural heritage , as they are indicators of adaptation strategies paramount to innovation and cultural reprocessing. From this perspective, I differentiate between the principle of materiality associated with UNESCO World Heritage selection criteria and the principle of corporality evident in Michael Herzfeld s analysis of Crete s policies on the making of heritage (Herzfeld 2004). The principle of materiality includes a spatial-temporal conception that rejects the contemporaneousness between the work and the acts of production, the latter being assimilated to an anti-modern corporality (Herzfeld 2004) of social actors. Malian cultural policy on heritage establishment is based on such a principle and, owing to the international African art market s monopoly on aesthetic criteria, determines the exclusion of economic survival strategies and marks of identity of airport art sculptors. Contrary to this perspective, the principle of corporality that I propose includes a social meaning of cultural heritage according to which the human body is considered a holder of capital of the social relations of work (Jackson & Palmer-Jones 1999). From the reconstruction of the production network of sculptors of the Maison des Artisans in Bamako emerges a social aesthetic through which iconographic innovation comes from the economic precariousness and hierarchical relations governing the workshops.