I recently paid a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Middle East. The show covers art from about 100 BC to 250 AD, an era during which the Roman Empire in the west and the Parthian Empire in the east ruled the region. It occupies the museum’s largest exhibition space which has been subdivided into about a dozen galleries, each focusing on a particular area or culture within the region as a whole. Objects in the show were overwhelmingly ‘artifactual’ in nature — pieces of architecture, sculptures, coins, and decorative arts — with a handful paintings on plaster.

These galleries are arranged in a linear fashion, such that every visitor proceeds through the show following the same path, which conceptually follows the trade routes from southwestern Arabia, up through the Levant, and into Mesopotamia. By ‘guiding’ viewers through the show with a predetermined order, the curators are able both to enforce a narrative as well as draw out similarities and distinctions between bordering cultures.

As with most exhibitions at the Met, the primary source of information is in the form of the artworks themselves, wall plaques which describe and give context to the works, and supplementary commentary usually introducing a particular gallery and thus a particular culture.

Visitors are first greeted by a large wall text that introduces the show. This is the one bit of text which nearly every visitor stopped to read — perhaps due, in part, to the fact that it is nearly the only thing in the gallery — and thus must do a lot of the heavy lifting for contextualizing everything else that they will see. It also means that the design of that space is one of congregated people staring at a wall for a few minutes each. It’s something of an odd sight but it emphasizes the power that these few paragraphs will have in priming visitors’ engagement with the show.

Having entered the exhibition proper, one of the first things I wanted to focus on was the ‘speed’ with which visitors moved through the galleries. How many were looking at each object? How many were reading the wall plaques? &c. I sampled these patterns at three points in the show: in the first gallery, about midway through the show, and in the final gallery. Interestingly, it was in the middle gallery where people were most engaged with the works and with the texts. The final gallery saw the highest percentage of visitors ‘just walking through’, and the early gallery was between the two, but closer to the high level of engagement of the middle gallery. I suspect that part of the reason the early gallery saw less engagement was because it was also the most crowded, so either consciously or unconsciously, more ‘skipped’ this gallery to space themselves out, rather than waiting behind crowds to view objects. Curiously, the percentage of people reading wall texts (i.e., the general context-setting texts in each gallery, not the plaques for particular works) was about the same in each location: only ~15%.

The second thing I wanted to observe was, of those who engaged with works’ plaques, how did those plaques interleave with their viewing of the object myself? For example, I myself usually take a brief glance at the work, read the plaque, and then returning to the work. About two thirds of visitors engaging with the texts, however, essentially did the reverse: view the work, turn to the plaque for a varying amount of time — sometimes skimming, sometimes reading the entirety — glance back at the work briefly, and then move on to the next work. This variation in the order of engagement will inevitably shape how the plaque interprets the work and vice versa. ‘What did I just see?’ versus ‘What am I about to see?’ Understanding how people move between object and text might in turn inform what text should accompany a given work.

Finally, I wanted to observe the effect of object placement within the galleries. For example, objects along a wall, rather than in the center of the gallery; or objects in the middle of the wall or in a corner. On the whole, placement in this regard largely did not seem to matter. The one exception to this is that objects furthest from the ‘flow’ of a gallery were viewed slightly less than those in the mainstream of that ‘flow’; and this was regardless of how large or small the out-of-the-way object was or whether against a wall or in the middle of the room.

There were, however, individual visitors with identifiable viewing patterns. Several people — most often those moving through the gallery most quickly — primarily engaged with objects not against walls (which often tended to be larger ‘feature-size’ objects). On the other hand, one visitor stuck close to the walls, and for the entirety of the time I observed him, never approached an object not against the wall. From the general observations, however, it would seem that placement is more flexible than I would have thought, leaving curators free to use placement as a means of relating objects to one another without having to worry much about an object being in a ‘prime location’.

There was not much digital information throughout the galleries, with the exception of one gallery dedicated solely to a 12-minute video. Preceding the galleries on Palmyra, Dura-Europos, and Mesopotamia, the video is an interview with three archaeologists discussing the recent destruction of many monuments and artifacts in these regions by Islamic State and others. I was curious to see how many visitors would watch the video and for how long. Nearly everyone (~80%) stopped to watch for at least some time. About 60% watched for only a few minutes, while the remaining 20% watched all, or nearly all, of the video.

I would be curious to know how this compares to video installations in other exhibitions. Unlike many installations, the gallery is not ‘off to the side’, such that one must actively choose to entire the installation space, nor is it a small screen alongside other works. This is the only thing in the gallery, it is projected against an entire wall, and one must pass through in the course of making one’s way through the show. These gallery features, along with its darkness between other brightly lit galleries, serve both to ‘confront’ viewers with the interviews, easing their way into watching it, while also convey that this is something important, which the curators want everyone to watch, and not just another work alongside the other 200 in the show.

All in all, though a museum exhibition like this is largely, to the passive observer, a largely non-interactive experience for visitors, there are nonetheless clear patterns of interaction which develop as visitors engage with the works, with descriptive plaque texts, and context-setting wall texts and maps. By consciously looking for these patterns, one can see ways in which a curator might draw special attention to an object, such as was done with the video gallery.