ROMAN BUST UNMASKED: UNDER THE MARBLE, THE SAME MAN IN EVERY CITY

The Gallery's guest piece this week is The Roman Bust, from the Imaginarium: Mr. Samman rendered as a Roman of some standing, with marble-white curls, a beard that appears to have taken several centuries and an orange toga worn with total confidence.

Visitors arriving from the front page, where a long-running production keeps recasting the same role in different cities, say the bust explains a great deal. "Statues don't change parts," said a docent. "You carve the role once and then you put it in every city. Rome, then another Rome, then another." Kahn Sole of the Retro Desk observed that a small Gaulish village warned everyone about these Romans decades ago, and that nobody listened.

Critics are kinder. The bust is not a villain, this reviewer would argue, so much as a man who believed his first draft was his only script. The marble is the habit. The face underneath is still deciding.

The Gallery has placed a small dinner table in front of the piece, set for two. Staff say it is not a prop. It is for anyone with an apology to make in person, which the front page suggests is how the run finally closes. A visitor asked what the Romans ever did for us. A docent pointed at the table.