NEW YORK— Last week Surrealism permeated the art world, with the announcement that Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto will sell at Sotheby’s being only the most obvious note. What else? Well… United Nations peacekeepers are vandalizing prehistoric paintings in Western Sahara. An Iron Age man found in a peat bog will soon travel from London to Manchester. A study found that the world’s oldest oil paintings are in the Bamiyan caves in Afghanistan, where the Taliban destroyed two monumental Buddha statues seven years ago. And plans were announced for Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex and the City fame to produce a Project Runway-type show for the art world. Things are starting to look like that kitschy, gloomy, queasy-making Dali landscape with the melting clocks, a blasted tree, and clusters of ants. 

There was jarring news that Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork Spiral Jetty, which juts into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, is threatened by plans to drill for oil nearby. And that wasn’t the only development related to threatened artists and artworks: Denmark's national library in Copenhagen will buy caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that landed an editor who published them in 2006 with a three-year jail sentence. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose critical statements on the Internet were threatened with removal last week, bravely told a reporter that the upcoming Beijing Olympics are a “propaganda show.” And the mail-and-wire-fraud case against American artist Steven Kurtz still hangs in the balance, with news that a federal judge will decide after March 7 whether or not to dismiss the charges.

If artists are under threat, so, it seems, may be the art market, with what could be the first glimmerings of a recession on the horizon. London-based research company ArtTactic found that confidence in the contemporary art market has dropped by 40 percent over the past six months. Despite news that Sotheby’s profits may be lower than expected, the auction houses are painting a pretty picture, and Old Masters sales in London and New York were unaffected. Still, market upheaval hit the art-fair circuit. A fair in Frankfurt has been canceled, and Art Cologne director Gerard Goodrow resigned under pressure from fair management after dealers raised concerns about attendance and loss of international exhibitors.

Upheaval was also the order of the day at a group of art-world mags owned by Brant Publications. After Peter Brant bought out the 50 percent stake owned by his ex-wife Sandy Brant, Ingrid Sischy, longtime editor of Interview magazine, resigned and was replaced by Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron, who will reportedly also oversee Art in America and The Magazine Antiques. The New York Post reported that real estate magnate Aby Rosen is a silent partner in Brant’s buyout. Rosen was in the news elsewhere in connection with his company RFR Realty LLC's move to evict the bankrupt Salander O’Reilly Galleries from its Manhattan mansion.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, a group of artists were handed a vacate order from the city; the Chelsea building that formerly housed the Dia Art Foundation will house high-end gallery space and apartments; and the Whitney Museum of American Art branch at Altria closed permanently.

Museums looked topsy-turvy in other ways. There was news that the federal investigation into stolen art had widened from Los Angeles to a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago and a gallery in that city. And a report recommended improvements to the business unit of the Smithsonian Institution. And the trend of toilers in the nonprofit fields leaving for the greener pastures of the art market—think Lisa Dennison—continued with two notable departures: Robert Fizpatrick is leaving his post of ten years as director and CEO of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to become international managing director of the gallery Haunch of Venison, which is owned by Christie’s, and Norman Rosenthal, who has been director of exhibitions at London’s Royal Academy for 30 years, will depart to become a freelance curator.

Is the art world in crisis, or just in flux? Either way, it’s worth considering these words from art commentator Matthew Collings apropos the graffiti-iste of the moment: “Banksy being considered a ‘conceptual artist’ is only a measure of how banal and feeble the ‘concepts’ of contemporary art are, and an indication of art’s slide into all-out philistinism. To appear tuned-in we now have to pretend that a literal crack in the floor at Tate Modern means global unease (the latest commission by Tate Modern in its annual Unilever series), that a lot of real people standing on a marble plinth means ‘humanity’ (Anthony Gormley’s proposal for a new work on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square), and that Marc Quinn’s new sculptures at White Cube of fetuses are ‘influenced by Michelangelo.’”