ARTNET NEWS

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute has a winner with "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty," May 4-July 31, 2011, featuring approximately 100 ensembles and 70 accessories in a spectacular kitsch-fest that should have boomers reaching for the LSD, punks tearing holes in their clothes and Goths reaching for their black makeup. [image: Alexander McQueen, "Alien" shoe mold, Plato’s Atlantis, 2010].

Here’s one gallery event guaranteed to draw a crowd. Celebrity porn star Sasha Grey (b. 1988) is due to appear at Martha Otero Gallery in Los Angeles this Wednesday, May 4, 2011, to sign her new book, NEÜ SEX ($30), which features Grey’s photographs of her many activities, both on- and off-set.

Yes, that Roosevelt, or that family, anyway. In 1939, 19-year-old Quentin Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, journeyed to the remote border region between China and Tibet in search of the ancient Naxi [Nah-shee] culture.

Artnet Magazine stalwart Charlie Finch puts on his curator’s cap this month to organize "The Last Gesture," May 7-June 15, 2011, at David Hall Fine Art in Wellesley, Mass.

Manhattanites! Add another stop to your uptown gallery tour. Poet’s Den Gallery at 309 East 108th Street in Spanish Harlem presents "Uptown Renaissance," opening May 5, 2011, 6-9 pm, featuring works by Damon Johnson, Federico Castelluccio, Scott Nickerson, Francis Kughler, Joseph Grippi and Al Loving.

Our favorite Lower East Side alternative space -- ABC No Rio at 156 Rivington Street -- holds its benefit gala and art auction on Tuesday, May 3, 2011, 7-10 pm, at Allegra LaViola Gallery at 179 East Broadway in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood.

* U.S. photographer Spencer Tunick, known for his photos of mass gatherings of nude volunteers, plans his next shoot at Israel’s Dead Sea, the lowest spot on the globe, reports Bloomberg. [Image: Spencer Tunick, Montauk 6 (detail), 2009].

Perhaps only a few sales were noted at the gala party for the newly hatched Spring Show NYC, Apr. 28-May 2, 2011, though people watchers did spot New York Observer publisher Jared Kushner and his (pregnant) wife Ivanka Trump [pictured, photo by Ann Watt] at the Park Avenue Armory, roping in the younger set, along with a horde of top decorators like Bruce Bierman and Darren Henault.

Veteran muralist Knox Martin (b. 1923) has been painting walls in New York City long enough to see some of his public works overtaken by irresistible urban development, such as Venus, a 1970 mural at West 19th Street and the West Side Highway that in 2010 was blocked from view by Jean Nouvel’s high-end condo project.

After perplexing his fans with his gnomic "Catenary" paintings in his 2005 exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery (though not Artnet Magazine critic Charlie Finch), artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has gone back to basics -- the numbers 0 through 9 -- for his new show at Marks, titled "Jasper Johns: New Sculpture and Works on Paper," May 7-July 1, 2011.

New York’s Museum of Art and Design has announced a “multi-platform retrospective” -- not an “exhibition, per se,” says the press rep -- of art-school-trained superstar rocker David Bowie, to open May 9, 2011.

Artist Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) has won the 2011 Calder Prize, which includes a $50,000 cash grant, a residency at the Atelier Calder in France’s Loire Valley and the placement of a signature work in a “major public collection.”

* Jamaican Archbishop Donald J. Reece has complained about the propriety of a nude torso of Jesus made by artist Laura Facey, the Catholic News Agency reports. [Image: Laura Facey, Body and Blood of Christ, 2011.]

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei may be detained incommunicado by the Chinese Communist Party, but his artworks continue to be unveiled around the world -- notably via new exhibitions in New York, London and Berlin.

A noteworthy plan to take artworks by eight African-American artists to the 54th Venice Biennale, June 4-Nov. 27, 2011, has been suddenly canceled at the last minute by its corporate sponsor, Benetton.

The Holy Mountain in Queens? That’s right, starting next month, MoMA PS1 is presenting continuous showings of Chilean cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s two-hour-long The Holy Mountain (1973), a surrealist satire depicting the adventures of a Christ figure (played by Jodorowsky) and a rebirth scene that was supposedly filmed while the actors were tripping on psilocybin mushrooms.

Blanton Museum of Art director Ned Rifkin has announced that he is resigning his position to devote more time to scholarship and teaching at the University of Texas at Austin.

French art dealer Yvon Lambert is retiring after 45 years in the business, closing the New York gallery and turning the Paris operation over to his protégé Olivier Bélot [pictured].

"I’m making lemons out of lemonade," exclaimed the irrepressible American artist Cindy Tower, who some remember from her 1993 show at a SoHo gallery that featured a gargantuan necklace of old boyfriend’s heads made from chain-sawed and painted sections of tree trunks.

* It’s no burlesque, but fashion muse Daphne Guinness [pictured] is slated to “get dressed” in one of four Barney’s windows devoted to her closet on May 2, 2011, as part of the Metropolitan Museum celebration of Alexander McQueen, reports the New York Times.

The brand new Spring Show NYC, Apr. 28-May 2, 2011, is making its inaugural appearance at the Park Avenue Armory with an impressive lineup of 65 top dealers, members of the Art and Antique Dealers League of America.

Since the churches of Venice are especially rich in paintings by Jacopi Robusti, aka Tintoretto, why not include some examples in the 2011 Venice Biennale (where perhaps they might be viewed under better lighting conditions)?

Collectors flood into New York at the beginning of May, ready for the big auctions of 20th-century art at the major auction houses (launching this year with Sotheby's New York evening sale on Tuesday, May 3, 2011).

Artistic success is certainly part of the American Dream, and the 30-something Tennessee-born New York painter Josh Smith is definitely getting his share.

Operating a global art-museum empire doesn't come cheap, and Guggenheim Museum and Foundation director Richard Armstrong has just brought on some new fundraising help -- that is to say, two new deputy directors.

British sculptor Brian Alabaster is selling an £18,000 bronze sculpture he made of a family friend, 13-year old ballerina Florence Barker, to help her pay tuition at London’s Royal Ballet School, according to the Daily Mail.

* A 1935 Picasso watercolor of Marie-Thérèse Walter hits the block in London this June, with a presale estimate of more than £9 million-- with the proceeds earmarked for obesity research at the University of Sydney, reports the Guardian.

The forces of Law & Order in Los Angeles, never known for wise forbearance, are reacting to "Art in the Streets" at the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art by arresting every graffiti artist they can get their hands on.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has scheduled a winner for this fall: "Degas and the Nude," Oct. 9, 2011-Feb. 5, 2012, a show featuring 175 Edgar Degas works from 60 lenders, co-organized with the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

The Associated Press is always ready to slap a brand on a photograph and sell it to the media. Too ready, according to courtroom artist Pat Lopez, who has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against both the AP and Getty Images, claiming that the two image banks have been selling her copyrighted drawings without permission.

Art theft is taken very seriously in Egypt. Vincent van Gogh’s painting of a vase of yellow flowers, dubbed Vase with Viscaria, was stolen last year from Cairo’s Mahmoud Khalil Museum, and now five people -- none of them the thief -- have been sentenced for negligence in regards to the crime.

If the U.S. has any kind of Hindu spokesman, it would have to be Rajan Zed, the Las Vegas-based head of the Universal Society of Hinduism, whose many ventures into the press range from campaigning for an “R” rating for the movie Angels & Demons to participating in the “On Faith” dialogue at the Washington Post.

Veteran New York photo dealer James Danziger is moving his shop, Danziger Projects, from its current location at 534 West 24th Street around the corner to a 3,500-square-foot storefront space at 527 West 23rd Street, effective May 1, 2011.

Time to add a new stop to your Chelsea gallery rounds, if you haven't already -- Bertrand Delacroix Gallery, which was opened by a dealer of the same name in March on the ground floor of 535 West 25th Street in Chelsea.