Boston Phoenix Review: ‘The soft shock of the new’

One of the great dreams of any art aficionado — whether your passion is painting or performance or books or music — is the dream of stumbling on a new, unheralded talent and then telling your friends all about it to prove how cool and in-the-know you are. It’s this hope of being surprised by somebody or something you haven’t seen before that’s the lure of shows like “New Art Collective: Emerging Curators Select” at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly and “New Art ’07” at Kingston Gallery in Boston.