The curators of the current SAM exhibit, “Roman Art from the Louvre,” have their work cut out for them. They have less than an hour—my unscientific estimate of how long the average visitor spends at the exhibit—to overturn centuries-old perceptions of Roman art. From state-commissioned statues of the emperor to vine encrusted silver spoons, art, the curators suggest, was a fundamental part of Roman daily life and Roman citizens, from such diverse climes as Gaul and Northern Africa, consumed and produced fashions and artistic tropes that they recognized and celebrated as distinctively Roman. In this way art helped erode, though not entirely eliminate, regional loyalties. In short, art helped integrate the sprawling empire, by making its subjects feel Roman. But do the pieces in the exhibit and the manner in which they are displayed convey these themes? Should you expect to leave the show with a stronger, more vivid sense of what it meant tobe a citizen of Rome? That the show, which closes May 11^th, does not meet its lofty aims suggests as much about our contemporary relationship to Roman history and its art as its does about the tension between an antiquated model of museums and their contemporary audience—potential and actual.

For centuries the Louvre’s Roman art collection has been on display in the museum’s basement. Aesthetic considerations trumped historical chronology and context. Recently, however, the Louvre announced plans to renovate and redesign the wings of the museum devoted to Roman art. Part of the motivation behind the collection’s current U.S. tour is to give the Louvre’s curators an opportunity to experiment with the collection, to test out new approaches to its display. Clearly influenced by recent scholarship in the fields of social and cultural history, which stress “reading” historical artifacts as texts, the curators hoped to make art speak to life, in this case to the Roman everyday. To this end they arranged the pieces in rooms devoted to different aspects of Roman life, such as citizenship, life at home, soldiers, and women. The catalogue and audio guide provide further supplemental information, focusing attention on how the individual artifacts help uncover the complex layers of Roman society.

When I walked up to the entrance I was greeted by a pleasant but clearly bored SAM employee who then directed me to a rack of free audio guides. According to the SAM employee, most visitors take one. But, when I asked him if he would recommend it, he was quick to assert that he would go without it. “It slows you down,” he said. After visiting the show once with the guide and once without it I realized that he was right. The audio guide did “slow me down.” It was difficult to find a way to jockey between the guide and the individual pieces on display. Not only that but it was awkward. It didn’t start out too badly. I pressed the designated number on the mobile phone looking gadget, held it to my ear and stared at the enormous bust of Lucilla at the entrance. SAM director Mimi Gates welcomed me to exhibit in a self-consciously enthusiastic, canned voice. “Transport yourself back in time,” she intoned to the sound of lutes and drums, “Imagine yourself as a citizen of the Roman Empire at its height.”

Yet far from being transported “back in time,” thirty seconds into Gates’s introduction I was feeling very anchored to the present and heavily burdened by the audio guide. With streams of visitors arriving behind me and getting ready to begin their audio-guide accompanied tour, I had to jostle to maintain my position in front of the bust. Even when I did find a safe spot next to a mounted copy ofthe show’s catalogue—with a sales pitch popping out from its pages, “Buy me,” it said in big black letters—I still felt uncomfortable. I could not figure out what to do with my eyes while listening to the guide. Where should I look once the guide was no longer discussing the piece in front of me? I was suddenly feeling very self-conscious. What expression should I wear? Should I nod in agreement, as if saying, “Ah, yes, they got that detail right about the Persian origins of this woman’s Flavian period hairstyle.” Or, should I look coolly bored, letting the young and hip know that I would rather be updating my MySpace page but somehow got dragged into seeing this show. It’s not that I amalways so terribly self-conscious but in such a highly social space it is hard not to notice the people around me and, in turn, to notice that we are watching each other as much as we are looking at the mosaics and busts of dead Romans.

As I wandered through the show, I noticed that other visitors were faring no better. Some stared intently at the white marble in front of them as they listened to the narrator discuss such topics as the toga and its relationship to a Roman citizen’s social and political status, or the role of the emperor in Roman life. Others stood near the relevant piece but gazed at their shoes or at the ceiling with expressions of obvious discomfort. No one seemed to be able to figure out how to find a comfortable way to stand and listen to the guide. Most people started out, like I did, faithfully relying on the guide in the first room or so. But then their enthusiasm began to wane. Finally most abandoned them, preferring to talk to friends, to read the mounted texts or, as I eventually did, simply drift through the rooms, observing the individual artifacts in no particular order. By the last gallery, “the world of the dead,”I saw only one or two patrons listening to the audio commentary.

The problem with the audio guides is the problem with the entire exhibit. Like so many contemporary exhibits, especially those with an historical subject, “RomanArt from the Louvre” suffers from a communication gap between the exhibit and its visitors. Sadly, no one involved in the show’s design and display—of what are mostly static pieces of bleached marble—seemed to take into account the actual experience of visiting the show for presumably intellectually curious and technically savvy but generally historically uninformed museum visitors.The curators clearly devoted a great deal of time and thought to what messages they wanted to impart, to the show’s pedagogical aims and even to its potential political relevance (the audio guide includes, for instance, the response of a U.S. Marine who served in Iraq to a frieze depicting a formation of Roman soldiers). Yet, they stopped short of asking whether the methods they were using would actually speak to their audience. (Ironically, I thought that the museum shop was one of the only aspects of the show, which actually took into account the desires of contemporary museum patrons.) Instead the basic assumption underlying the exhibit is that visitors understand and utilize museums in more or less the same way as their Victorian progenitors.

Early museum architecture, patterned after Greek and Roman temples, serves as a visual testament to the Victorian relationship to museums. In the nineteenth-century museums were temples for worshipping high culture and antiquity. As such visitors dressed in their finest, spoke in only hushed tones and generally maintained a quiet atmosphere of contemplation and serious study. Traces of this old model of museum going were on display the busy Saturday afternoon when I saw the show. Visitors were on the whole quiet, their postures respectful before the sculptures and artifacts. Their tastefully selected clothing suggested that they were treating a visit to SAM as a special experience, something out of the ordinary.

Yet, I would venture to guess that their high expectations were disappointed and that many visitors were, if not outright bored, at least marginally dissatisfied with their museum visit. This is for the simple reason that the show lacks the technical and even sensory dynamism required to communicate with the modern mind. Today’s museum-goers tend to have shorter attention spans and to prefer learning by using interactive media and techniques of display and communication that go beyond the merely intellectual level. This is the audience that the “Roman Art” curators needed to address, instead of catering to an ideal, essentially Victorian, visitor that no longer exists.

Unfortunately shows like “Roman Art from the Louvre,” reveal just how tone deaf they are to the needs of today’s museum-goers. “Roman Art” relied on a handful of staid methods of communication: oversized mounted texts, small plaques affixed nextto the individual items, a handful of admittedly attractive renderings such as the interiors of Roman homes, the audio guides and, of course, on the pieces themselves, which included mostly marble statues and busts but also some mosaics, pottery, friezes and sarcophagi. Of these various forms of communication the most innovative piece of technology was the audio guide, which American museums introduced in the 1970s!

If the aim was to capture the visitors’ imagination so much more could have been done. In the room on citizenship, for example, they might have set aside a small space where visitors could listen to speeches from famous Roman statesmen delivered by local actors, preferably with a Patrick Stewart-like baritone. Or, in the room devoted to family life, they could have sectioned off a space with video projections of films that accurately depict Roman interiors. These are just some of the possibilities the Louvre curators might have explored when considering how to engage a contemporary audience by adding more texture and dynamism to an art collection which is, of course, static and a historical period, which is unfortunately remote from modern consciousness.

I admire the show’s attempt to overturn old paradigms, to breath new life into the Louvre’s Roman art collection. But therein lies the tragedy of the show. For the Louvre’s Roman art curators have something interesting to say about the role of art in daily life and political and social consciousness. Yet because they don’t know how to speak to their audience “Roman Art from the Louvre” fails to captivate, to make Roman history come alive through the remnants of its civilization.