Art or Science

If the following video is meant to be of "Self-Replicating Repairing Robots", then the engineers who designed this are blurring the lines here between Art and Science. I'm not quite sure how building this robot is helping anyone, but its good to look at. Someone out there may be able to answer a question for me that has been troubling me for some time. With every space shuttle mission, there are up to seven astronauts aboard. There are also probably three astronauts and/or Cosmonauts orbiting the planet right now on the ISS. My question is, has anybody ever commissioned an artist to go up into space as part of one of these crews, to see what he/she makes of the zero gravity environment? I mean, surely the human race could benefit in some way from people from other fields of society taking their work upstairs.