emerging -- eyelids lifting

We really don’t need any more emerging artists, the road to fame and glory pretty well traveled at least for the first few miles, pitfalls and detours still up ahead as support begins to fade. What art really needs is an emerging audience with an appetite for vision and substance, and enough of their own to recognize those qualities distilled in art. Sooner or later people come to understand when an artist has taken them seriously, an arresting experience that can feel like communion, seems familiar even intimate. If this very personal response in front of paintings becomes acknowledged and valued, a door opens in common thought that ripples out to nourish and inform other forms of discourse, broadcasting a humanizing influence felt all over town. 

Emerging artists, instead of courting grant committees and curators, the establishment’s gatekeepers, would be required to earn the direct support of fellow citizens, and aren’t we all in this together? I don’t think anyone really comprehends the incredible capacity of this virtually dry valley to absorb a river of art, producing abundantly another channel of community identity and cohesion. What mechanism makes this happen I don’t know, but gears grind. Every local artist seen enough to be recognized by the average citizen in a restaurant, on the wall of a salon or in the home of a friend, means art as a part of everyday life is emerging around here.