Ah the lazy days of summer. Week in Review took a break. A quasi well-deserved hiatus. Went on vacation, started a blog, dozed. Now, with fall upon us, the art world is once again creaking into motion, and the coming weeks promise fields full of news to dutifully reap, package, and post, from the latest developments in Damien Hirsts ongoing bid for world domination to — now that those pesky Olympics are out of the way — the wave of art fairs and biennials poised to sweep across Asia. To Singapore! Shanghai! Seoul! Gwangju! Not to mention Europe. London! Berlin! Paris! Collectors around the world are right this moment revving their engines and dusting off their sneakers.

But first, the weeks' news. Hirst may be gearing up to sell 223 fresh-to-market products at Sotheby’s in a few weeks (while his London gallery sits on, um, some inventory) but his New York dealer is certainly not to be denied his share of the spotlight. Larry Gagosian, whose own bid for world domination plays around the clock at seven galleries in four time zones, has devised a vast exhibition — 100 artworks! Giacometti! Koons! Serra! Lichtenstein! — to be installed in a former chocolate factory a stone's throw from the Kremlin. Sweet! Moscow's nearby State Tretyakov Gallery, as though having caught a case of Gagosian-style expansionitis, is in talks with the government about a new building for modern and contemporary art. Meanwhile, the little alternative art space that could, Miami’s auspiciously named Moore Space, announced in a sober press release that it will shut its doors. One wonders whether its founders — collectors Craig Robins and Rosa de la Cruz — may not have something up their sleeves, Moore-wise (relocation? integration into a larger entity?) because otherwise Miami's design district may lose a few visitors come December when, oh, you know, that little art fair pops into town for a week. This in the same week that the private museum of a Miami collector — or collectors, the Rubell family — made the news by donating 109 paintings by south Florida folk artist Purvis Young to Morehouse College. (China proved less beneficent, denying loans to New York's Asia Society for an exhibition on political art.)

But not all was well at college art collections. Just around the time a team of Belgian archaeologists was having its eureka moment in Turkey, upon digging up an ancient statue of Marcus Aurelius, Wellesley College discovered it had misplaced its Léger painting. Indeed, it appears the university may have thrown it in the trash, as the painting was in a crate from which it had not been unpacked since its return from an exhibition in Oklahoma City a year ago. The Boston Globe's coverage of the story features so much talk of crates and vaults that one pictures that vast hangar into which the crated ark of the covenant was deposited at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's a disheartening thought. Good thing the Dead Sea Scrolls are being digitally photographed.

Across the pond, the National Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland have announced their intentions to join forces and buy Titians painting Diana & Actaeon for £50 million ($92 million). The painting would shuttle between the two museums and would not, presumably, be lost en route. No art objects are likely to be lost at New York's Guggenheim Museum in October, closely watched as they will be by art-loving visitors present around the clock, thanks to a project by artist Carsten Höller that allows for overnight stays booked through the Waldorf Astoria hotel.

Nearly lost to a national disaster — okay, this didn't happen last week but rather during the Week's rather lengthy downtime — was a sizable Jackson Pollock painting. About a month ago, the University of Iowa hinted at thinking about maybe considering looking at the possibility of perhaps selling their Pollock to pay for flood damage, thereby dropping a bomb on the Internet that detonated at Tyler Greens site Modern Art Notes and reverberated through the blogosphere, even throwing aftershocks into ye olde print media.

In Italy, the city of Venice can't decide whether or not it likes Santiago Calatrava's new bridge. In Montgomery, Alabama, litigious quilters and their dealers sewed up their differences out of court. In New York, artist John Chamberlain and onetime Andy Warhol assistant Gerard Malanga look likely to go to court over an artwork that may or may not be by Warhol. London city officials were disappointed by the inclusion of Michael Harvey's painting of a serial killer in a promotional video for the city's cultural programs, shown in Beijing during the Olympics. India's first contemporary art museum threw open its doors.

In Stamford, Connecticut, a thief (or thieves, considering the booty's weight) reached new heights of audacity, and perhaps irony, by making off with a lifesize sculpture of a policeman. And the poor, bronze fellow was on community watch at that, stationed at a street corner, caught perpetually in the act of writing a ticket. That, folks, is proof of public art's appeal.