There should be contest,competition for Art work not only for intrepid ibex or ubuntu but there should be Art work competition for Gnome lovers,
Gnome projects like Brasero,Cheese,Games,Abiword etc
See all these programs of gnome needs visual overhaul.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/
Certainly we need better art work in all gnome applications.
look at KDE they have very neat and good looking icons and artwork.Recently Launchpad held contest and the response was good,i think those people even can contribute to gnome.i think the response will be tremendous,like Google summer code
also it can be done before gnome 3 so that something of users get into real/Official Gnome 3.Hopefully ubuntu and its community can contribute to open source and Linux.