The show in the empty shop

The story repeats in most cities with young painters in them, and it is easy to picture in Jeddah.

A handful of artists cannot get a wall in any gallery that matters. Their work is too odd, or too new, or simply not what the people choosing are looking for this year. Each of them, alone, does the reasonable thing. Applies again. Waits. Hopes to be noticed next season.

Then one of them knows someone with an empty shop on an old street, and the empty room changes the conversation. Several maybes become yes. They hang the work themselves, print the cards themselves, sweep the floor themselves.

The first show is usually a disappointment. A few dozen visitors, most of them friends. One unkind review, if any. A joke or two at their expense among people who think they know what serious art looks like.

What matters is what happens the following year. They do it again, in the same room or a bigger one, and a little more of the city comes. Then again. Somewhere along the way the joke turns into a name, and the name turns into a movement, and the people who laughed find themselves explaining that they were early.

Two things were true of them, and both matter. They stopped waiting to be chosen. And they did it as a group, not alone.

The first is the one we celebrate. The second is the one that is rare. Almost everyone wants to be selected. Almost nobody wants to do the tiring work of gathering the others, finding the room, setting the date and holding the group together through the year nobody came.

That work is what turns a few isolated people into a scene. It is usually waiting for someone to pick it up.