NEW YORK—It was a slow news week, folks, aside from the revelation that the Guggenheim's new director will be Richard Armstrong, whose qualifications include being outgoing director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, and, perhaps equally significant, a man literally tall enough to stand up to Thomas Krens, who is still in charge of that little old Abu Dhabi project. 

In the department of good news/bad news, it was good news for Londoners — who can now see exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art for free — and bad news for Los Angelenos — the Getty Center cut its hours and raised its parking fees. Good news for Danish artist Marco Evaristti — a convict on death row has opted for an afterlife as art, agreeing to turn his body into goldfish food if his appeal against execution doesn't go through. And bad news for artist Terence Koh, whose sculpture of Jesus with an erection, on display at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, offended a local Christian. Good news for artist Wim Delvoye: A German collector has bought, for $216,000, one of the artist’s tattoo works that is currently installed on the back of a young Swiss man and has only to wait till the man dies to inherit it (though he can exhibit the young man three times a year). Bad news for the street artist Swoon, whose boats made from salvaged materials were deemed unseaworthy as they were on their way to be exhibited in Long Island City.

In the department of what if, imagine if artist Virginia Grayson had followed through on her plan to trash a self-portrait she was working on — it wouldn’t have won Australia's $20,000 Dobell prize for drawing. Or if the director of the Joseph Stalin Museum in Georgia hadn't fled in his car along with many of the museum's objects — the objects might have been destroyed during the recent Russian bombing. 

Cities faced aesthetic conundrums. Forget pigeons; the new scourge of Venice's historic St. Marks Square may turn out to be the giant electronic advertising screens meant to pay for the city's restoration efforts. Nearby Florence has its own dilemma: A Chinese city donated some statues that some Florentines find, well, ugly. In Athens, the local pagan population doesn't like the new Acropolis museum — so they held a protest ceremony, in which they dressed in white and appealed to the ancient goddess Athena; that'll show em! 

Things are looking grim for auction houses in Australia, which are smarting from a market dip, and litigious for Sotheby's in New York, which is suing CNET founder Halsey Minor, who owes the house $16.8 million on purchases. 

Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones wondered, on his blog, why Britain is subjecting national treasures like Stonehenge to egregious neglect. "If we betray these places our current love affair with the contemporary will be exposed as nothing more than a national descent into amnesiac ignorance." Now if the country could only peel its eyes off Damien Hirst.