NEW YORK—For anyone within a few hundred thousand miles of New York, the week's news, art or otherwise, paled by comparison to, or, rather, was refracted through, the greasy lens of the revelation that the state's Democratic governor Eliot Spitzer had hired a New York prostitute for services in D.C., and his subsequent resignation. While Spitzer and his aides huddled in the governor's Manhattan apartment for a day and a half as reporters swarmed outside, the rest of us peered into our computer screens, poring over the rumors those reporters filed on countless Web sites and blogs, commenters on all those sites demanded resignation (and hurry it up please will you), and a Republican state legislator threatened to initiate impeachment proceedings. (Along the way, someone even managed to find an art angle to the sordid story.) New York would have Spitzer's head, and, when he finally stepped down, it did.

As though on cue, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired a painting by Gauguin of a severed head resting on a pillow. According to one expert, Gauguin painted it with the intention of shocking the Parisian public, for whom it was first displayed in 1893. In Thessaloniki, Greece, meanwhile, erotic artworks by Picasso were deemed unsuitable for the eyes of schoolchildren.  

Ned Rifkin stepped down from his position as under secretary for art at the embattled Smithsonian Institution, even as the institution continues to search for a replacement for secretary Lawrence Small, who resigned in March 2007 after his spending had been called into question. But wince not — no shades of Spitzer here. Rifkin's resignation was no fall from grace; it was, Rifkin told the Washington Post, part of an agreement made with acting secretary Cristian Samper to stay a year after Samper accepted the temporary position.  

Elsewhere the news was more auspicious. Philanthropists, has the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm got a deal for you: You can buy a Rembrandt painting at a sizable discount, as long as you donate it to the city's National Museum, where it has hung for a century and a half. Price: $49 million. That's only half what New York businessman Stephen A. Schwarzman donated last week to the New York Public Library. And what does he get? Oh, just his name emblazoned across the front of, you know, that iconic building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street with the pair of big stone lions out front.  

The Dow spiked this week, and the art market continued to look resilient, with news of steady sales at TEFAF, the annual art fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands. This despite the theft of a [$1.8 million] necklace from a dealer there. Well, these things happen. More good market news came from London, where Russian bidders drove up prices of contemporary Russian art at a sale at Sotheby's. That auction house also made unusual news when reports appeared that an auctioneer there, Matthew Festing, had been elected Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, a Catholic chivalric order known for its secrecy. Well, it's secretive according to the Da Vinci Code, anyhow. Another story related to what was, actually, very much a secretive organization, namely, the former East Germany's storied Stasi secret police. A Dutch old master painting confiscated by the Stasi from its owner in 1985 will be sold by a descendant of that owner at Christie's, New York, in April.

So what was the week's takeaway? Hmm. Whether it's chivalric orders, secret police, or state government, who ever really knows what goes on behind closed doors?