I know how you feel. I've been in a similar situation like you for years. I can only assume that it's the same for artists (I wake to find myself on the coding side quite often).
The problem is that people either want to do their own pet projects or work for money, but not be a partner in a project they don't deeply care about. The solution is of course to make people interested in your work and then give them the possibility to help you - but how to get someone interested in your work if you can't really start? You basically need to have some $$$ and pay someone for a couple of months, and no artist nor game designer nor programmer can really do that.
Of course you can always use some freely available material to create a demo. But without solid graphics, many people who could help you will not even try the demo. As an artist, you can do mockups, and I think those are great at attracting people. But at least we're no musicians. ("Look at this awesome piece of music I made, let's make it into a game" - ever heard that one? no? me neither. And that's although music pays for half the atmosphere...).
Maybe you need to have a peer group with artists and programmers, connected in real life, in order to start something. And then you can attract people.
Anyhow, back to topic. Did I understand you correctly: What you're asking for is not a full-time artist sitting by your side, rather than an extensive graphics library including free files from the artists at this site. Old stuff they drew and never used, things like that.
It would sure be great to have a "resources" forum, tagged by size, perspective, type (tileset, character, enemy, ...) and license. Something like what we had for warcraft 3:
http://www.wc3c.net/resources.php .
I think that's a good idea. It's good for artists so they can look at stuff and learn, and it's good for programmers so they can build games with that stuff. It worked wonders for warcraft III (which also had a good amount of standard graphics, that was a huge bonus!)