NEW YORK—This week the Metropolitan Museum of Art stole the spotlight, rivaling John McCain in the taking-the-press-(and everyone else)-by-surprise department, when it appointed as director Philippe de Montebello's successor its tapestries specialist Thomas P. Campbell. Meanwhile, the Denver Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art formed search committees to look for new directors, poet Dana Gioia is stepping down as NEA chief, and David Mickenberg, director of Wellesley College's Davis Museum and Cultural Center, resigned after a Léger painting went missing from the museum. 

With turmoil in the markets — banks on the brink! — how long will art hold out? Christie's had an Imp/Mod day sale that showed the middle market may be robust, but things are looking somewhat grim for the Damien Hirst sale taking place today and tomorrow, what with Sotheby's share price down 8 percent. In the storm of press anticipating the sale, the Guardian's Jonathan Jones came to Hirst's rescue, sort of: "Damien Hirst is more interesting than any other artist of his (my) generation. His flaws are part of his bizarre humanity, as an artist." This comment came while Hirst busied himself dissing art critic Robert Hughes — "Luddite!" — after Hughes dissed Hirst's shark — "a clever piece of marketing, but as a piece of art it is absurd." (In the department of posthumous dissing, Francis Bacon dissed Matisse: "I loathe [his things]. I can never see what there is to it, with all those squalid little forms. I can’t bear the drawings either...," Bacon said in recorded off-the-record comments in 1987.)  

The Getty Institute is forming an online database for monitoring archaeological sites in the Middle East. Eighty-nine relics were discovered in Afghanistan. Hungary is offering to return looted antiquities to Greece. And Liechtenstein is refusing to lend a painting to the Jewish Museum in Berlin; the decision was accompanied by harsh words from Liechtenstein's Prince Hans-Adam II, who called Germany a "fourth" Reich. 

The Annenberg Foundation in Los Angeles will open an exhibition space for photography. A study uncovered the lack of strong arts education in the United States. New York will at last get a free-standing Rem Koolhaas building — and a new tower by Herzog and de Meuron that comes with an Anish Kapoor sculpture. An American collector wants to rebuild a castle in Berlin. And accusations of conflict of interest swirled around the Jeff Koons exhibition at Versailles, while protesters gathered at the opening to decry it.

Sarah Douglas is Staff Writer at Art+Auction. She blogs at "The Appraisal."