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Still, like everything that functions or doesn’t in New York City, “The Patriot” has a real estate component. In all its drippy humanity, “The Patriot” is the very opposite of a sterile concrete sales floor. There’s a giddy embrace of chaos that used to define the downtown scene but has mostly been absent lately, zapped by self-conscious appraisals of taste and smoothed over by the uniform gloss of social media and expansionism. (Juliano-Villani: “Billy used to date someone there who owed him a favor” a spokeswoman for the Morgan, of course, said the object had never been in its collection nor had the museum lent any objects to the exhibition.) Occasionally the entire gallery groans, signaling a visitor has tripped the vibrating underfloor in a side room housing a vitrine filled with what’s billed as Abraham Lincoln’s death pillow on loan from the Morgan Library and Museum.

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It was impossible to determine if a plastic shopping bag left in the middle of the main floor was or wasn’t an actual piece of art, but it may as well have been (it was later retrieved by a visitor, but a similar one could be found strung up in the office, where a series of flashing video works on tiny screens blink like a miniature Shinjuku district). A gallery assistant asked about the probability of it exploding.

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An artist was tending to a kinetic sculpture set on the floor, a complex network of silicone skin pumping and recycling what looked like blood from two gallon-size jars. A handful of people wandered around, sharing what looked like the same stunned expression of sensory overload. When I returned the day after the opening, the scene was much more civilized. If the show uses them as props, none of them seem to mind. While the thrill felt by a struggling artist securing their first group show must surely be real - and alongside established artists like Josh Smith, no less, who has previously filled commissions for Louis Vuitton, and who here contributes a Rauschenbergian cigar box with razor blades affixed by chewing gum - it will not figure as anyone’s big break or burnish a C.V. In terms of excavating the depraved heart of American art production, it’s in many ways more effective. It presents a kind of alternative Whitney Biennial (most work was submitted by local artists, but some from as far as Virginia and Vermont). The show is a microcosm of the art scene in all its frustrated expression: art school dropouts, first-timers, artists long-suffering in obscurity, the wildly famous. If the overall effect is that of a Cooper Union thesis show on psilocybin, it exposes, probably inadvertently, the deep and teeming desire among the city’s artists clamoring for exposure and desperate for recognition, and the difficulty in securing commissions and representation.