Image by Ellen Forney

I was on a long drive with a close friend and collaborator recently. We were in the middle of a wildly rambling conversation about the arts and, in particular, the artist as a passive participant, a guilty bystander. I stopped and said, “This is what will be said about us. This is what will go in the history books: That an entire nation stood by and watched the arts in America go tits up.”

Let us place some blame—always makes me feel better. Private foundation support for the arts is drying up. The Rockefeller Foundation has cut its arts funding to cure malaria by 2010. Bill and Melinda think world hunger is more pressing than the arts. (I agree, for the record.) The Flintridge Foundation, largest funder of ensemble theatres, has cut all theatre and visual arts funding in order to concentrate on serving their local community in Pasadena, Calif.

The public funding picture doesn’t get much rosier. In 1996, the newly Republican-controlled Congress slashed funding to the National Endowment for the Arts by 39 percent—with the intention of eliminating the Arts Endowment entirely by 1998. After fervent politicking on all sides, Congress dictated the end of nearly all of the NEA’s individual artist grants. To be fair, funding has recovered somewhat in the last six years, but the overall NEA budget remains at a pre-1980 level.

And you know what? The voting majority in this country wants it that way. It blows my mind sometimes, but it’s true. Most folks don’t want their tax dollars to pay for some big city performance artist to piss on a crucifix or boil her tampons. I know I do. Not.

At home in Seattle, the future of public funding of the arts is in doubt. 4Culture is King County’s taxpayer funded arts granting organization. As a huge 4Culture fan, I was astonished to discover that in April 2007 Louise Miller, the organization’s vice president, testified in Olympia in favor of Senate Bill 5986. This bill would have extended expiring hotel, motel and rental car taxes to finance a new half-billion dollar arena for the Seattle Sonics in Renton. (Right now, they’re paying for Safeco Field and the stadium we blew up to make way for it.) Why did 4Culture appear in support of the bill? Because a few crumbs left over from those stadium taxes are currently what’s funding the arts in King County, and public arts funding in King County might end entirely without those crumbs.

The reality is that the community at large will support and maintain the entities and causes it cares about. Seen our shiny new library? The Public Library Foundation raised $82 million from private donors. New opera hall? Fifty-seven percent private money. Been down to the Olympic Sculpture Park yet? Private donors funded 75 percent of its $85 million construction. Yet smaller arts organizations and individual artists all around the city are suffering.

Why? Because no one cares—and the biggest threat to the arts is not a lack of funding. The biggest threat is apathy.

I could not begin to tell you, and I probably don’t have to, how many truly talented people a city like Seattle draws to itself. Musicians, tattoo artists, painters, writers, filmmakers, DJs, actors and sculptors move here every day. There’s more going on than you can shake a stick at, and yet we are making art in our little bubbles. It is actually possible, and I have discovered this in this last year, along with ArtsWest and Seattle Repertory Theatre, for two theatres in the same town to plan the same show for the same dates. Seattle is rich in artistic human resource. And yet it is so, so weak in artistic solidarity. Perhaps we don’t deserve to survive.

How can we allow this to happen?

Too many of us are standing by and shrugging as the arts dry up in this country. Forget the arts funders and the arts patrons; the artists themselves don’t seem to take art very seriously. I know so many artists who have spent all their savings to move to big wicked cities and wait to be discovered. Newsflash: If you don’t show up and make art like it’s your job, no one will ever pay you to do it.

I remember the moment I decided to become an artist. I was a sophomore in high school, and we were studying Art Nouveau and the Symbolist painters. I learned that Gustav Klimt used to rent two hotel rooms when he traveled, one for himself and one for his paintings. He would spend the night running back and forth, trying to escape himself. He would punish a canvas if it wasn’t turning out the way he wanted by putting it in the hen house and letting chickens shit all over it. Michelangelo, the biggest homo in town, was protected by the pope himself. I remember thinking: That’s marvelous. I will be an artist, and I will get away with everything.

My thinking has matured only a little. I am still acutely aware of the power of original thought, but I am now also aware of a responsibility to my community. The power you want is the power you have. Not just as an artist, but as a patron. We all have the power to decide. What’s important to us as a community? What’s important to us as a nation? As a people? What are we willing to stand up for? Decide that and show the fuck up like it’s your job. If you can’t make, donate. Hell, even if you are an artist, donate. You can write it off. I make between $20,000 and $30,000 a year designing scenery for theatre. I donate to KEXP like it’s my job because I am terrified of the day I wake up and John in the Morning is gone.

(There are exceptions to the rule. Seattle has small, nonprofit, volunteer-staffed arts organizations that are doing everything they can to support young artists and writers in a coordinated way, combining efforts across media and creating a real reason to value their work. Watch the struggles of Seattle Dramatists, Washington Ensemble Theatre, the Shunpike, Crawl Space Gallery, RIVET. I digress.)

It isn’t for some bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., to decide what art represents us. It isn’t for some bureaucrat in Washington state, either. When it comes to the culture around us, we live in a time of unprecedented digital democracy. Every moment presents us with some choice, something to be photoblogged, YouTubed, MySpaced and downloaded around the world. We the public have never had a louder voice with which to choose what’s culturally important to us.

So what’s important to you?