To be at stake

Hi. The following three paragraphs are from the same book Art and Advertising by Joan Gibbons. Do you think "to be at stake" in these paragraphs imply "to be considered and to be of importance"?

Context:

Often the first response to art, especially in the popular press, is to stress its seeming frivolity, its surface shock, rather than trying to draw out the deeper issues at stake within it.

In effect, the relationship of the Docklands posters with the historical avant-garde extended beyond practices associated initially with the USSR to those developed by politically radical artists in the context of Nazi Germany. However, what was essentially at stake in both of these historical contexts, as well as in the Docklands poster campaign, was the need to communicate quickly and effectively.

Working as he does across a range of disciplines and in a range of media, it makes sense to style Kaye according to the Renaissance model of the cultural producer as a man of ‘varied talent and learning’. Kaye makes a clear distinction between his advertising work and his other more self-generated projects, claiming art, for instance, as a pure activity and advertising as somehow contaminated.1 This returns to a point that I raised in the introduction concerning the relativity of people’s ideas of art and the survival of dominant perceptions of what art is and what it is not. In this case, it is the survival of the essentially Romantic notion of the artist as the agent of feeling and imagination which is at stake, as opposed to the notion of the commercial or applied artist who practises a somehow ‘lesser art’, compromised in expressive freedom by the client or the marketplace.