Not one to miss a political opportunity, arts advocates (with a big boost from our own Rep. Norm Dicks) managed to extract a little stimulus money from Congress. More, they hope that President Obama, who is clearly interested in the arts, will be a strong voice for more public funding. After all, Obama is a fine writer, enjoys blues and jazz, and has a chief of staff who once was a ballet dancer. There's even talk of a cabinet-level Secretary of the Arts.

And what about this state, with its famously low level of support for the arts at the state level, and not much better at the Seattle level of public support? Can the argument that arts funding is instant stimulus prevail against all the better-organized pressure groups trying to retain funding during hard times?

There are three tests for the Governor and the Legislature. One is increasing funding for the State Arts Commission, badly underfunded and not exactly favored in past Gregoire budget requests. (Arts do not appear to be her thing.) A second is securing some of the expiring stadium taxes for King County's arts-funding organization, called 4Culture. This seems more likely, if only because 4Culture has patiently lobbied for this share of hotel-motel taxes for so long that it has a good place in line. Then too, with the Legislature likely to turn down other supplicants for those stadium taxes (such as Husky Stadium and KeyArena), it will want to soften the blow a bit with the long-promised 4Culture money.

The third test is a sleeper bill (HB 166 in the House, SB 5786 in the Senate) that would enable local counties to pass a tenth-of-a-cent increase in local sales tax to fund arts and cultural organizations (including such things as zoos, botanical gardens, history museums, and science museums). The idea, long gestating locally, is imported from Denver, which has a seven-county district that flows about $50 million a year to such organizations, in exchange for many more free-admission days and educational programs. The Washington proposal is being pushed as part of the Prosperity Partnership's efforts to stimulate the economy (in this case by making sure cultural amenities, key to an area's attractiveness for employers, don't wither in the recession). It's just below the radar, so as not to stir up the opponents.

Let me make a disclosure: I've been working with the group formulating this proposal. I've come to think it would be transformative if we could enact it here, adding about 15 percent to the budgets of cultural institutions in the four counties of central Puget Sound, in exchange for much more access and educational programming and free days. Alas, the way our arts groups are quietly sliding into crises may mean that about the time we realize how critical this funding is (we have always been way behind other regions in public funding), the time will have passed in the Legislature for enacting it. But maybe it will slide through in the incredible frenzy of last-minute deals bound to be the finale of the session.

As for Obama, it appears that he has been influenced by a group of Chicago-based academics, as well as by one of his most influential advisers, Bill Ivey, the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. In his 2008 book, How Greed and Neglect Have Destoryed Our Cultural Rights, Ivey argues for shifting funding from major institutions to the "expressive life" of communities and the more indigenous American cultural forms. This is dramatic stuff, for it would mean less emphasis on fine-arts institutions such as museums and more on getting money to where culture actually happens. Here's how Andras Szanto puts it in a fascinating article in The Art Newspaper:

Ivey is hardly alone in pushing beyond traditional notions of high culture. He represents a new school of arts-policy thinking that places value on hitherto underappreciated, amateur, community-based, digitally-mediated, often commercial arts—the kind of creative pursuits, in short, which most Americans enjoy. This broadening of perspective would constitute the biggest shift in policy since the implementation of large-scale cultural support in the post-war era.

I hope arts advocates are not driven to opposition to this kind of thinking, yet one more instance of how serious Obama is about "change." Going where the people are and where the arts are living, not "museumized," may be the best hope for re-establishing a valid claim on public funds in a time of economic calamity. Fortunately, a lot of this new thinking is embodied in the cultural-access district bill quietly making its way in Olympia.