Mad, bad and dangerous to know. Lady Caroline Lamb's famous description of Lord Byron trips off the tongue. The curled darling of London society may have died an exile from England (his homosexual proclivities were punishable by execution in those days), but once his death was announced his reputation gathered pace. By the time his funeral cortège was trundling, black plumes nodding, back to Britain, Byron reigned once more as the icon of the Romantic idyll.

But what does he have to say to our contemporary era? An exhibition now opening at Newstead Abbey, Byron's ancestral home, sets out to discover. A new arts organisation, Nottingham Contemporary, is holding an “amorous séance” as eight selected artists are requested to establish contact with Byron's spirit.

A ruined priory, originally acquired by the family from Henry VIII after the dissolution of the monasteries, Newstead was inherited along with his title by George Gordon Byron at the age of ten. It was virtually empty and almost in ruins when Byron inherited it. He was to struggle to keep it all his life - even making a brief and (particularly for her) unhappy marriage to an heiress in order to do so - but in 1818 he was obliged to put it up for sale and the medieval ruin, complete with monastic cloisters and terraced gardens featuring mad Gothic follies, passed out of possession of the family for good.

Times Archive, 1824: Conversations with Lord Byron

You ask if Lady Byron were in love with me - No! She married from vanity

• Conversations Of Lord Byron.

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Newstead is now owned and run by Nottingham City Council. It feels very different from a National Trust venture. The spirit of neglect which hung over it in Byron's day still lingers along the musty corridors and abandoned rooms in which a straggle of surviving relics are displayed. Here are a scattering of totemic objects: Byron's (surprisingly ordinary) bed; a painting of his beloved Newfoundland dog Boatswain (its extravagant tomb complete with poetic inscription is in the grounds); the skull he dug up in his garden and mounted in silver to make a drinking cup; the mock ancient Grecian helmet he wore on his way to fight (and die) in the Greek Wars of Independence.

But the overall impression is decidedly makeshift. There is not enough money to create the “authentic Bryon experience” - which is probably one of the most authentic things about the place. Can the contemporary add new life to this rather dusty collection of memorabilia?

This new show - That beautiful pale face is my fate, also one from Lady Caroline Lamb - certainly serves two purposes. On one level, it offers local audiences a chance to catch up with contemporary developments - including the work of Goshka Macuga, who is on this year's Turner Prize shortlist. And on another level it helps to refresh the Byronic story by focusing on aspects that appeal to a modern mindset.

Byron's Gothic sensibilities (he liked to dress up in monk's clothes, for instance, and sit up drinking all night from his skull goblet) prove a strong inspiration. The peculiarly modern nature of his highly image-conscious celebrity is also explored. And perhaps it is hardly surprising that, of the eight chosen artists, six are women. This is a poet who, for all his disparagement of women - “I like them to talk because then they think less” - had a great deal of the woman about him, including her tenderness, candour and caprice.

But this show proves elusive. For a start it can be quite hard to spot the artworks. A tiny crinkle-crankle bit of gold, for instance, turns out to be the detachable tooth of Shane MacGowan from the Pogues. It has been slipped by Marcia Farquhar into the display cases of Byronic memorabilia alongside a bronze cast of the dead cat of Joe Strummer (of the Clash) and a wig made from the hair of the musician Jem Finer. Farquhar has been assembling the memorablia of the people whom she considers to be Byron's modern match. Are punks his inheritors? It's a valid idea to contemplate.

Unfortunately, other works are a great deal less illuminating. Alexis Marguerite Teplin's splotchy little paintings don't add anything much either to the bedroom furnishings or to our perceptions and an accompanying confection of fine fabrics and silk footwear and pheasant feathers may be marginally more interesting to look at but you can't see it. Like a number of pieces in this show it is too far beyond a cordon which the spectator can't cross.

For other contributors this scandalous show-off offers too easy a subject. Almost anything will do. Pablo Bronstein contributes a handful of obscure Gothic novels for which he has the drawn covers. It is part of an ongoing project and relevant only in the widest sense. Blue Firth lays a wooden pentagram in a cloister garden that was originally laid out according to established patterns of divine symmetry. She lets a heavily loaded symbol do all the work for her, as does Goshka Macuga when she leans a mirror, sandblasted with a portrait of Byron, against the wall.

The most evocative works are a film by Ulla von Brandenberg, an innovative German artist, that finds a resonant site in the deep cellar room Byron once used as a plunge pool. A sense of past and present slide together, evoking the ghostly overlap of history's many layers, as they do in David Noonan's mysterious screen print of what looks like a louche oriental scene.

For the most part, the most interesting thing about this exhibition is the way the pieces can help to articulate the story of the poet to whom they pay homage. What is that owl doing plonked down like a piece of Gothic kitsch on the great hall table? I'm not sure. But it reminds one that this vast derelict space was once the home to a menagerie that included anything from a bear to a three-legged goat.

Perhaps the problem is Byron. He was too overpowering a character. These eight international artists do not feel mad or bad enough.

That beautiful pale face is my fate is at Newstead Abbey, Nottingham (01623 455900) until Sept 7

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