NEW YORK—The week was full of strange revelations, the strangest, and saddest, of which was news of a woman who died on the altar of performance art. Having set out on an international hitchhiking expedition in a wedding dress to promote world peace, the artist was raped and murdered by a motorist with whom she’d caught a ride. Another artist, meanwhile, is looking for volunteers to die in public as part of a planned artwork. And in other morbid news, late painter Mark Rothko’s remains will, after all, be transferred from one cemetery to another.

Wrongdoings and changes of plan abounded. A Smithsonian staffer who resigned in February is accused of having abused her expense account (she denies it), and the CFO of the Guggenheim Bilbao is accused of having embezzled nearly half a million euros from companies linked to the museum (he admits it). Collector Eli Broad’s giant stainless steel sculpture of tulips by Jeff Koons is being removed from outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum three months into a planned one-year stint due to damage caused by visitors touching the piece. Two members of the advisory board responsible for acquiring works for the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh quit after members of the parliament pressured them to purchase a monumental sculpture of a lion that they felt would devalue the collection. (In other Scotland news, the government’s new efficiency-savings drive will hinder the National Galleries’ ability to purchase artworks.)

Yale pulled out of its plans to open a branch of the university in Abu Dhabi — the university felt it could not devote enough staff to offer the Yale degrees the United Arab Emirates government insisted on. But the university may have thornier business on its hands — no, not the art student who claimed to the Yale Daily News that she had been artificially inseminating herself and inducing abortions as an artwork, because, in fact, she had done no such thing(s), and the fictions themselves constituted an artwork — as the fine art and antiquities world continues to try to sort out who owns what. After years of negotiation, Peru now claims that there are some 40,000 artifacts from Macchu Picchu still housed at the university almost a hundred years after the expiration of an alleged 18-month loan — which is ten times as many as had been on the table. On the other hand, the MoMA and the Guggenheim will be allowed to proceed with a lawsuit aimed to prove their ownership of two works by Picasso that a university professor had claimed belonged to his heirs, who were forced to sell them during WWII. A 16th-century Dutch painting that was returned to its owner after being confiscated by the Stasi some 20 years ago made that owner some $8.1 million at a Christie’s auction. In a boat garage near Rome, police recovered a wealth of looted antiquities, including a rare statue of a Roman emperor, that were believed to be headed for the international market. And three stolen sculptures by Fernando Botero were found in a car in the suburbs of Verona.

In the same week that eBay put the kibosh on a program that allows participation online in live fine art auctions, a fund was launched that will invest in the art market at large. Perhaps private money may also rescue cash-strapped museums. Bank of America launched a program whereby works from its prodigious collection will be made available for special exhibitions in participating museums — with the upside that the bank will cover much of the exhibition costs.

Gagosian Gallery must be something of a trendsetter. Next month Sotheby’s will preview lots from its New York contemporary sales in a luxury shopping mall outside Moscow, the very mall that Gagosian annointed, art-wise, with a temporary group exhibition of gallery artists last fall. And the new designer of the Frieze Art Fair tent — to succeed David Adjaye — is none other than Caruso St. John, the firm responsible for designing Gagosian’s vast Britannia Street space in London and co-designing his new gallery in Rome.