Could a failed art show be a kind of art?

My boys would point out various works they admired, and I would jot down the titles, in the poignant, almost insane hope that my ship might yet come in, someday, and I’d track the works down and buy them. “Happy graduation, son, here’s that painting you liked at Art Chicago 10 years ago.” Right.

Not this year. And the irony is, the reasons we liked the show — its overwhelming scale, with a scruffy student show and a big antiques fair — are the reasons the show failed.

“They turned it into a three-ring circus,” said Carl Hammer, owner of the prestigious Carl Hammer Gallery on North Wells. “The main show was watered down. Some of these major galleries came here, put together million-dollar booths and went home without a sale.”

Buying pricey contemporary art is a leap of faith, a mania, and the spell could be broken if one floor down a Columbia College sophomore was selling his yarn-andtongue-depressor sculptures.

“I thought the show was horrible last year,” said another dealer, who asked not to be named. “The bad art made a lot of the good art look worse. And it was really crowded — they must have been handing tickets out at the missions.”

Ah, that would be me and my family she is referring to. Freebie media tickets in hand, stumbling goggle-eyed past truth and beauty we neither created nor could ever pay for. Sorry about that, Chicago. Our fault, for being art world freeloaders, parasites, at least on purely financial scale. But art breaks the bonds of the money that births it. You might just as well say that the tourists in Rome, gaping, heads tossed back, in the Sistine Chapel don’t belong, because they aren’t Pope Julius II, the man who commissioned Michelangelo’s vast ceiling early in the 16th century.

Isn’t that what the rich buy with their money? A part of something that might last after their BMWS are crushed into scrap? To join a story that goes back to hunters smearing berry red bisons onto the walls of their caves?

We may detract from the lux environment, but the public still adds value, by caring. So though commerce has decreed no show this spring (take heart, there’s a new art expo set for Navy Pier in September), we can hold our own virtual Art Chicago, and contemplate the show that isn’t there. It reminds us that art adds decoration and ideas to life. Without it, life tends to subtract, as things slow down and fall away. Shows come and go. Art lasts.