At least 10,000 people will have asked this question this week, so one more time won’t matter: What the heck is a giant eyeball doing in the middle of Pritzker Park?

Oh, I know. A lot of city residents coming downtown to the Auditorium Theater, and the suburbanites and the tourists who want to see the sights in the southern end of the Loop, like the Harold Washington Library architecture, have been “ooohing” and “aaahing” now for a few weeks about what a magnificent piece of art work artist Tony Tasset has created for a cost in the low six figures in the park at Van Buren and State.

Indeed, it makes a nice accompaniment alongside the Library/State/Van Buren CTA station, full of Pink and Purple and Orange and Brown line trains coming and going and picking up passengers. Passengers who may be sick of the city’s red-light cameras and the blue light drug/mug spy cameras installed by the police department. If you are going to get spied on by Big Brother, it makes sense to be amused by it all with an artistic statement.

Against the backdrop of the John Marshall Law School (my alma mater) and the Fisher Building, I suppose a big blue eye with a white sclera and a lot of red veins popping out is something different. Thought-provoking. Mysterious. Cool.

I still don’t get it.

Neither does woman-about-town Kathy Posner who wrote on her blog that a three-story tall eyeball doesn’t say “art” to her and must be awfully scary for kids. Posner wrote that the piece “makes the veins in my own eyes bulge in dismay.”

But it’s cute, I guess. And people like cute. And weird — just like the history of Pritzker Park. A piece of city land that was just never quite together, to say the least. It sat muddy and undeveloped for years. Then it was planted with grass and had an ugly cheap flimsy fence around it, preventing everyone from going in and sitting on the grass. Then trees were planted, the fence was taken down, some angular landscaping was installed. Some plants that look like sagebrush were planted on a slope that looks like it’s ready for a prairie dog invasion.

The city was always scared that the homeless would camp out there. They did and still do. In spite of a new little coffee kiosk that was installed recently. There was even talk at one time before the Library Tower condos were built of the city swapping the land and constructing a park on the other side of Congress and State, and Library Tower being built at Van Buren and State instead. Obviously, that didn’t happen.

And so, today, we have come full circle, and we have Pritzker Park with the installation of a giant eyeball. We of the city of big shoulders just have to roll our eyes and be glad we have those shoulders on which to carry such a big peeper.

As for me, I have a much better idea for that eyeball. It’s educational. It’s fun. And it can make some money for the city. You know how the Museum of Science and Industry has an exhibit that allows you to walk through a beating heart? Why not open Tasset’s big eye, put a walkway through it and let people examine the inside of an eyeball?

There’s plenty to see. The retina, for instance, an organ which lines the back of the eye, the optic nerve, which travels directly to the brain. There’s the vitreous, a gel-like substance that fills the eyeball and maintains its round shape; people could wade through that. In the front of the eye, visitors could make their way through a wavy maze of lens, cornea and iris. And they could learn about the pigment in front of the eye that gives it its color.

On certain days, the lens could be discolored to show what a cataract looks like; the retina could be detached and the cornea could be scratched. All in the name of education about eye disease. The lessons could be so detailed that the kids could get little certificates as junior ophthalmologists. And who knows? They could grow up and discover a way to prevent glaucoma or macular degeneration.

And in no time, the Chicago Loop Alliance could recoup its investment in the “EYE.” For a few bucks, I think people would line up for that walk-through. They wouldn’t even bat an eyelash.