It happens so immediately, I think it is a work of performance art. I rise out of my car and a man appears next to me. He is middle-aged and freckle-faced with slicked-back thin red hair. We're in the parking lot of a revamped modern hotel and he's wearing jeans and a stonewashed jean jacket. Pointing to the hotel, he asks, "What's going on here tonight?"

I tell him this is an art fair. "That's pretty classy for the East End," he says. He points to a silver car and calls out, "There's a Porsche!" He leaves toward the hotel, I go for my stuff in the trunk, and by the time I'm headed inside, he's returning to the parking lot. "I just had a fight with my wife and I just want to get a room, but I can't even do that," he starts in, introducing himself as Gene. "This place is nothing like what it used to be. I haven't been here in probably two years. I'm a longshoreman. Our dispatch center is over there."

The dispatch center is a prefab concrete building decorated with blue tiles, set in a low-lying zone of light industrial buildings, the next closest being Allright Ladder Co. The cheap old hotel, incongruously called the Waldorf, was renovated and reopened eight months ago as a "creative compound." Gene tries to persuade me to skip the art and go for a drink. I sort of miss him when he goes, especially when I enter the hotel and behold a front desk selling $9 imported toothpaste and fashionably threadbare T-shirts probably made in some squawkingly innocent manner (by hemp-recycling homeowners living within bicycling distance?), before ascending the staircase into what is called the FAIR or The Fair or Vancouver Art Fair—I can't remember—but which I am calling the Non-Fair.

I am calling it the Non-Fair because of a simple definition of terms: The quantity "art fair" and the quantity "Vancouver art" are non-overlapping. An art fair—say, Art Basel in Switzerland, or Art Basel Miami, or New York's Armory Show—is a luxury mall, a commercial free-for-all not driven by ideas but by sales. Vancouver art, on the other hand, is a temple of conceptualism, a specialist's archive. The idea of a "Vancouver Art Fair" implies a Venn diagram that is improbable and potentially comical. I must see it for myself.

Carved wood panels in the hotel rooms are not art—they're part of the hotel's tiki theme. Room 121, with a sign over the door that reads "The Lake & Stars Shop-In-Room," is likewise not art—it's a place to buy lingerie, and remains closed this particular weekend.

The art is to be found (among beds and dressers) in the rooms along an L-shaped corridor. There are 17 galleries (and one bookstore) represented, from Vancouver, Seattle, Mexico City, Toronto, Victoria, Munich, and Berlin. In one sense, this Non-Fair is a zoo. It presents various species of galleries while protecting them all from the predation of the real world. There are commercial enterprises selling stylish, bright, faux-naive drawings; semi-ironic-but-attractive sculptures; and paintings ranging from cartoonish to neo-­formal. There are also galleries selling nothing but good intentions (i.e., shopworn rhetoric), or history (video of a 1980 performance piece by a hilarious man who set a new record for the greatest number of illegal border crossings in 84 seconds at Point Roberts, Washington), or good immediate experiences (rather than objects for sale).

But this is still Vancouver, and even the "predators"—the actual-objects-for-sale art—are tame. If British artist Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull can be considered a great white shark in art's money-hungry ecosystem, the closest thing here is a crystal squirrel delicately laid on a bed with a spray of fake flowers—a recent work by Stranger Genius Award winner Susan Robb, represented in the room of Seattle gallery Lawrimore Project. The squirrel is a lovable moment in a beautifully curated display of videos, installations, and sculptures by multiple artists that changes every day in this little room, inspired (as a finely printed handout explains) by William S. Burroughs's cut-up methods.

Vancouver art is a land of clever foxes—likable and ingenious, not smug. In another hotel room (rented by Or Gallery, a government-funded, artist-run center in Vancouver), the art includes: funny-smart framed prints, a clump of American one-dollar bills sitting on a nightstand next to a handsome first edition of Das Kapital (with a brown marbleized cover), and a video playing continuously on the flat-screen TV, in which the flashy commodities at Amsterdam's annual Millionaire Fair talk to each other in accented voice-overs.

Vancouver artist Dan Starling made the amusing video, Commodities Start Talking at the Millionaire Fair (a baroque candlestick asks a glass sword, "Do I have to spell it out for you? M to the A to the R to the X"). At the Millionaire Fair, the commodities are, like, a Hummer limo, a shoe made entirely of gold, or a sparkling beanbag. Here at the Non-Fair, Starling stands in a hallway, crowded against the wall; I wonder what he'd make the objects say to each other in this very different expo.

"This is not a real fair," Starling tells me, reminding me that, in fact, most of the art world isn't here, since this is opening weekend for the Venice Biennale, where all the collectors and curators go. "It's like a conceptual art fair."

Here in this ethereal wilderness, there's both real appeal and plain old goofiness. In one room, members of the collective Instant Coffee are asking visitors to explore the question "Has money devalued art?" (I find this goofy.) They've hung posters: "Feeling So Much Yet Doing So Little," "Together We Can Stop the Rain," "There Is No Romance in Taking a Risk."

In a room shared by the journal Fillip and European publisher Motto Books, the posters read "Hot Dogs Are Not Bookmarks" and "Deprofessionalize." Books range from starchy to sexy, and persons are overheard discussing whether a certain restaurant "understood the concept of veggie."

When the contingent from Seattle University's Hedreen Gallery crossed the border on its way to the fair, the border guard asked to see the art in the car. Artist Jason Hirata pointed to a pair of audio speakers composing the basis of his (ultimately visceral) installation, and the guard said, "So what you're telling me is you don't have anything that looks like art?" Luckily, the guard waved them through, unlike the customs officials a century ago who declared Brancusi's abstract classic Bird in Space neither bird nor art. Are these new officials a new breed? Is it something about sharing the border with the new sculpture Non-Sign by Seattle's Lead Pencil Studio, a billboard structure made of welded steel rods that's empty where the sign would be?

The logo of the Non-Fair also involves empty space—a whole bunch of it, beneath the words "THE FAIR." This shouldn't be taken too far. The fair is not empty. It's open—to commercial galleries, nonprofits, institutions like Seattle U's gallery, and independents like Seattle's Season, run by artist Robert Yoder (who made a sale right off the bat). Which makes it sort of great. There's simply a higher quotient of interesting art here than at a regular fair.

All of these factors lead me to believe that the fair's organizer, Lucas Soi, will be a predictable type: progressive, liberal, etcetera. He is young. He is an artist. But this being the Non-Fair, it is already Backwards Day, so I should not be surprised when, in a conversation on the curb facing Allright Ladder Co., Soi professes sympathies with the Republican Party of the United States and calls himself a hustler and a capitalist. (From the sound of it, a Canadian conservative is like an American centrist, but still.)

Soi is an inveterate litterer. "When in Rome," he says of dodgy East Vancouver, throwing down his beer bottle. (He grew up in West Vancouver, the wealthiest neighborhood in Canada; he now, as a full-time artist, lives in East Vancouver, the poorest neighborhood in Canada.) "East Van" are the proud and defiant words that appear in a giant cross-shaped text sculpture nearby, by the artist Ken Lum, who grew up here, but who is a classic conceptualist.

"I'm not a fan of Ken Lum," Soi says. Has he seen the Lum retrospective currently at Vancouver Art Gallery? "I'm not a fan of the VAG."

And yet, Soi is something every community needs: a detractor who doesn't just complain, but organizes.

Of the 18 galleries at this fair—the first in what he hopes will be a continuing tradition, despite the fact that he intends to move away—several turned his work down when he tried to show there. But now, says Soi, "I'm working with all the galleries in town that would never work with me, and working with them all at the same time."

"I'm, like, übercapitalist," he says. "This is why I love the USA. What I'm doing is I'm bringing the American philosophy to Canada."

Soi came up with the idea of a weekend-long fair after he heard that the renovators of the Waldorf were looking for programs to fill up the rooms. He was driving to Seattle for an opening at Season, where a conversation with Robert Yoder put the idea firmly in his mind for a fair in Vancouver. Yoder's self-run gallery (based in his house) was the first to sign on.

Soi's pen-and-ink drawings are not at the fair, but the fair is intended to provide room for art that doesn't fit the Vancouver model the same way his doesn't. The fair's website is ArtAfterMoney.com, and by this point in the conversation I'm thinking the URL refers less to timing (the recent British Columbia government funding cuts to art) and more to the notion of going after money—trying to make some dough.

"The dialogue [in Vancouver] has been, 'We're above money, money is beneath us, we can make work that's so rigorously conceptually based that we don't have to explain it to anybody.' Fine," Soi says. "But that's the only game! How about the other game? Sales. How about we give artists a living wage?"

Back inside the hotel, in a room with walls and windows covered by large blueprints for dream homes designed by amateurs using online software, the respected France-and-Canada-based artist Nicolas Sassoon considers this dream for Vancouver. "I think," he says gently, in his French accent, "that Vancouver could use a little more of the idea that there's a market."

Come Monday morning, in fine Vancouver fashion, actual sales figures remain elusive. Soi won't release numbers but says there were "lots of sales." His clickers counted 1,000 fairgoers. And Seattle dealers like Lawrimore and Yoder say the low stakes—each room cost only $600 for the weekend—made the experience well worth it. "One or two people is all it takes, and I know there are one or two people in Vancouver who are going to be important in advancing my artists' careers," Lawrimore says. "And the company is good." That last bit is especially true.