There’s an unfortunate asymmetry in visual art. What might have taken years, or a stroke of creative brilliance, is rarely given more than half a minute of attention. One study found that the median time spent looking at a painting in a museum is 17 seconds. Monet’s waterlilies and Degas’s dancers get less time than it will take to read my gripes. In an age of impermanence, can the contemporary art market help us identify the value of art?

I attended EXPO CHICAGO earlier this year, an annual contemporary art exhibition that attracts a mélange of galleries and artworks. As I strolled around some of the latest and greatest of the art world, I thought, here are the people who have figured it out. Here were the people who knew what to sell and what to buy. The people who were so certain about the value of art that they were willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. What have they realized that we haven’t?

One thing about art fairs is that they don’t feel like museums. Seeing art for sale imposes a different sort of relationship onto the viewer and the object. Like window shopping, my ego was active; I imagined myself in the artworks I stopped at. The art market recovers a kind of lost activeness in art viewership. I found myself captivated by the contemplative emptiness and emotional cohesiveness evoked by Mina Jin’s Constructed Landscape, achieved with a style at once both digital and distinctly painted, in large part because it seemed like it could fit so well on the walls of my own home. “That’s Metcalf money!” a UChicago student looking to buy something told me, pointing out the price of the piece.

Take Ejiro Fenegal’s statue work and Chika Idu’s paintings from Houston’s Mitochondria Gallery, which are gorgeous and visually striking. Both artists took the familiar and permuted it behind a layer of the fantastical. These aesthetic features are, of course, present regardless of whether the works are for sale. But it is also true that the prospect of ownership creates a personal connection to the art, which imbues it with significance and meaning that extends beyond the transient moment of viewership. In a world of minute attention spans and numb dopamine receptors, these deeper relationships with art are sorely missing, and patronage could be one thing that helps us recover them.

(It’s a shame, then, that the global art market seems to be dying. The former global director of Art Basel wrote in June that galleries are struggling and closing at a steady rate, amid a stagnant art market and a new wealthy class not interested in buying art.)

There are a few notable exceptions to this. Some great paintings are so full of depth, so pregnant with feeling, that they don’t need any additional factors, like the prospect of ownership, to invite engagement. Most people are already “invested” and find them plenty enticing at first glance. I think of Rothko, for example, whose paintings indescribably capture audiences with an intense emotional pull.

But not every painting can be a Rothko, and there are plenty of others that could move you if given the chance. It’s not as if we don’t think these other paintings should be valued. We venture out to museums in droves—last year, the Art Institute of Chicago recorded 1.5 million visitors. Viewing art is something we all like to do, even if we can’t explain why or justify it with more than a glance at them. But we often don’t feel the worth. We take photos of art like stabs in the dark at meaning, hoping to capture something permanent when we find that our feelings don’t rival the grandeur in our eyes. So there must be something more to our attraction toward art, to its urgency, than our initial impression of it.

There is something to be gained from taking a greater stake in art than the passive viewership with which most people pass through the museums. Take theater: an art form that every viewer takes a kind of investment in. There’s investment in that moment when you tense up in a darkened theater and lean forward in your seat. It’s the kind of active emotional attachment I saw at EXPO CHICAGO.

Perhaps the answer is in another form of art. Homer’s Iliad is a book we all seem to agree matters. There is something present in it, even though it may be less gripping and emotionally evocative than works of contemporary prose. Is it its age? Its existence as a cultural touchstone? The beauty of Achilles’ and Patroclus’ brotherly love? Its novelty and timelessness? It is probably a combination of all these things, plus a good measure of scholarly relevance and societal value.

And the same can be said for a lot of great paintings. Maybe we are just looking at them wrong. Just as we wouldn’t expect to understand the value of the Iliad from glancing at the first page (though the first line, “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,” certainly does catch the ear), we shouldn’t expect to intuit the significance of art by strolling past it in a museum. It is as if we set ourselves up for failure—when we don’t give art a proper investment, its depth becomes too easy to write off.

So, for those of us who don’t have thousands to spend at an art expo, how do you do that? How do you imbue art with the significance it deserves? Here’s an exercise: next time you go to a museum, pick a painting that you think looks nice or is highly regarded, plant your feet, and force yourself to spend five minutes staring at it. Perhaps you will find new meaning in the art. You may notice your heartstrings pulled. Of course, you will invariably feel like a weirdo and see acutely how little time the rest of the museumgoers are spending.

Another option is to situate art politically, so that it immediately cashes out in relevance to its audience. One of the highlights of this year’s EXPO was a booth for the Obama Presidential Center (OPC), surrounded by galleries containing a curated selection from various artists who are now featured in the center’s museum. Here, in the middle of what was essentially a large art market, was an example of a robust collaboration between curator and community. I felt that there was an emphasis on the impact that you rarely see in the art world. It was about as “applied” and real-world as art gets.

I spoke briefly to Louise Bernard, the curator of the exhibition and the director of the OPC’s museum. “[The EXPO] has just been an amazing way to expose people to the mission of the center and the energy behind it, and for them to see it within the context of this major arts platform,” she told me.

As I looked at Richard Hunt’s fluid and narrative sculpture, Swan Column, easy on the eyes yet complex enough to evoke many possible meanings, I was reminded of how urgent art can be when it speaks to its audience. Sitting in the garden of the OPC contextualized by the large library behind it, Hunt’s work will inspire viewers with real relevance. By virtue of being in a different location, Hunt’s sculptures will take on an entirely new significance. In a political setting, audience investment will be baked in.