Last spring, after Texaco cancelled its sponsorship of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, and then Chrysler cancelled its annual awards program for designers, I started wondering if there was some sort of new contagion of art indifference afflicting big corporations.

But this fall, during just the last few weeks, I've come across three very different instances of businesses supporting art. Not as traditional philanthropists, giving money away to arts institutions and creative people, but by embracing art and artists as parts of their businesses.

The first was the New York museum show, "Glass and Glamour: Steuben's Modern Moment, 1930-1960." It's an exhibit of objects from the time when this fussy, traditional, old-line glass company went virtually avant-garde overnight. In the early 1930s, they started recruiting modernist designers like Walter Dorwin Teague to make bowls and vases and goblets that were radically simple and austere. Some of their pieces featured designs by artists like Matisse and Isamu Noguchi. It's a lovely show and a reminder of how corporate culture and culture needn't necessarily be at odds.

What really heartened me about Steuben, though, was what I just learned from a reliable source: that their executives today are quietly exploring a return to that kind of collaboration, and commissioning cool contemporary artists to make new glass pieces.

And then there's the story about executives at Barnes & Noble, who just re-published a literary novel that had been out of print for 30 years. The book is "Stones of Summer," which one obsessed reader had made a documentary about--a film you may have discovered first here on Studio 360.

Barnes & Noble say they've sold 15,000 copies in less than a month.

And then there's Nissan, the Japanese car company. They've just launched what may be the single strangest campaign by a major advertiser ever. You know the commercials that play before the trailers before the movies in theaters these days? Nissan bought some of those spots for its Altima model in theaters showing Matrix Revolutions. And then they hired live actors to portray poets and planted them in the audiences in theaters. During the ads onscreen, these quasi-professional pseudo-poets each suddenly stand up and, without any warning or explanation, scream out their Nissan-scripted lines of poetry. Like this:

"WHO ARE YOU?!"

"A CHILL IN A GROUP OF FREAK-OUTS!"

"GOODNESS FOR BAD BOYS!"

"COURAGE WHEN HEADS ARE HELD LOW!"

"A WHITE HOT METEOR AGAINST A CLOUDY SKY!"

It's bizarre, and I guess I should take it as another sign of the decline and fall of Western civilization. But I've got to say, I sort of love that a big corporation has the guts to do something this wacky and human and small-scale.

As I said, none of these experiments is pure patronage, like Texaco with opera or Chrysler with design. These businesses are all trying to sell things, not give them away. But I find each one interesting and even a little exciting. These corporations are making real bets on the proposition that art (or simulations of art) is good and useful. In each case, some big-deal decision-maker has had to say "yes" to a real--and even risky--aesthetic choice.

Which is definitely not business as usual.

This is KA in Studio 360.

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