Is this a good thing? NO.
A true sign our economy is very bad. Although some of us may never come
close to receiving a major grant or award for art. Programs similar to this
also support non-profit community organizations and youth arts programs.

There is a fine line between corporations and artists. For the big picture
we need then to support the arts blindly. We want them to buy everything
they can get their hands on. And yes, they do collect art with political and
pornographic elements.

Don't fight it. Infiltrate and influence change.


NY-Times
Chrysler Design Awards Dropped After 10 Years
By BRADFORD McKEE

HE Chrysler Group, which spent the last decade promoting design innovation
as central to its car-selling strategy, quietly but abruptly ended its
Chrysler Design Awards program on Monday, two days after announcing staff
changes at the top of its marketing department. On Tuesday the company said
it would post a second-quarter operating loss of $1.2 billion.

Chrysler's awards, given each fall, started in 1993 to recognize six
designers based in the United States with a trophy and $10,000. (Last year,
the award also recognized advocates of good design.) In a relatively short
time, some began to think of the award as a mini-MacArthur Foundation grant
in the design field, with awards going to the architect Frank O. Gehry
(1995); the graphic designer Bruce Mau (1998); the team that designed the
landing apparatus for the Mars Pathfinder probe (1998); and even the late
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was recognized last year for his labors
on behalf of Grand Central Terminal and the planned conversion of the Farley
Post Office to a new Penn Station.

But months of disappointing sales, which at Chrysler, a division of
DaimlerChrysler, continued into May, may have made the company's high-minded
connoisseurship seem misplaced.

On May 30, Chrysler's head of marketing, James C. Schroer, resigned and was
replaced by Joseph Eberhardt, DaimlerChrysler's chief of operations in
Britain. This week, Trevor Creed, senior vice president for design at
Chrysler in Auburn Hills, Mich., sent letters to people close to the awards
program explaining that "the company's dollars had to be placed specifically
towards our core business