From 1929 to 1932, Man Ray and Lee Miller — two giants of the European Surrealism movement — lived together in Paris, first as teacher and student, and later as lovers. Their mercurial relationship resulted in some of the most powerful work of each artist’s career, and helped shape the course of modern art. Combining rare vintage photographs, paintings, sculpture and drawings, a new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, tells the story of the artists’ brief but intense association and reveals the nature of their creative partnership. On view from June 11 to December 4, 2011. www.pem.org

YSL’s Resort 2012 collection shown in New York June 1st

On August 5, 2010, a U.S. District Court in Montana restored federal protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies. Wolf hunts in Idaho and Montana have been temporarily halted, but now more wolves may be killed by Wildlife Services—federal agents who are seeking authority to gas wolf pups in their dens and sterilize breeding pairs to control the wolf population. And in Alaska More than 1,000 wolves in Alaska have been killed by aerial gunning since 2003, and state officials are pushing to kill even more wolves this year using aerial gunning, poison gas and snares. Take action now to save wolves in Alaska…CLICK HERE

It seems as though even California’s leading university is accepting pornography as art as UCLA currently exhibits a nearly month long retrospective of films by the legendary art house pornographer Radley Metzger–famous for such films as The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Therese and Isabelle. www.happenings.ucla.com

English photographer Ray Billingham is best known for his book Ray’s A Laugh which documents the life of his alcoholic father Ray and obese, heavily tattooed, mother Liz. “My father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic. He doesn’t like going outside, my mother Elizabeth hardly drinks, but she does smoke a lot. She likes pets and things that are decorative. They married in 1970 and I was born soon after. My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11, but now he is back with Ray and Liz again. Recently he became a father. Dad was some kind of mechanic, but he’s always been an alcoholic. It has just got worse over the years. He gets drunk on cheap cider at the off license. He drinks a lot at nights now and gets up late. Originally, our family lived in a terraced house, but they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation, sold the house. Then we moved to the council tower block, where Ray just sits in and drinks. That’s the thing about my dad, there’s no subject he’s interested in, except drink.” Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh will be presented together for the first time with new work portraying his own young family at the Guernsey Photography Festival until June 30. www.guernseyphotographyfestival.com

Vuitton Family, 1888

When Louis Vuitton founded his maroquinerie label in 1854 on Rue Neuve des Capucines in Paris he knew how to make a good travelling case.  This is proven in durability and by the fact that most of the cases, even the earliest examples, still stand the test of time. And, just as well, the ethos of handmade luxury, that has slowly faded into a seemingly prehistoric notion, has lasted too–leaving the Vuitton unprecedented in the integrity of its craft–even through corporate mastication, mergers, and a platform in the publicly traded market. The Louis Vuitton label has had its own history in China too–in an age when the orient was a universe away from its Parisian base. In 1931 the Croisiere Jaune expedition led 40 men to drive 12,000 km from the Mediterranean coast to the China coast, following the footsteps of Marco Polo, was outfitted with Louis Vuitton trunks. And even further back to the 1907 Paris to Peking expedition when members struggled against temperatures as low as -30 degrees in cars outfitted with Louis Vuitton trunks. On view now until August 31 at the National Museum of China in Beijing, ”Louis Vuitton Voyages” explores its own history and tradition since its inception as well as celebrates the label’s place in Chinese culture.

Marilyn Minter, Chewing Green, 2008 C-Print

In Marilyn Minter’s work, pride of place goes to the complex relationship between body, photography and painting. Here, Minter exposes all our cultural inhibitions in dealing with sexuality and desire, the hyperrealist shots of high-gloss surfaces and sections of the body are both seductive and irritating at once. In the fragmented representation of lips, eyes, mouths and necks, decadence confronts beauty and the pitfalls of glamour collide with the fascination it exerts. Minter’s voyeuristic hallucinations seem both tempting and dangerous. Beauty here proves to be a brittle construct in which sensuality and self-destruction are two sides of the same coin; flesh, yearning, sexuality and gender models are revealed to be commercial products. For the first time, the oeuvre of US artist Marilyn Minter (born 1948) is the subject of an extensive exhibition in Germany. On view until June 12. www.sammlung-falckenberg.de

Gabriella Marina Gonzalez’s accessory collections are exuberantly sadomasochistic and by turns contradictorily flocculent on account of her cosmic balance of mixing knit and leather. Gonzalez, who is based in London, is onto her fourth collection, entitled Sinister Sights in Synthetic Moonlight, for her eponymous, made to order label.  Pas Un Autre asked Gabriella Marina Gonzalez a few questions about her new collection and whether we should be prepared for some kind of apocalypse. READ MORE >>>>

“Leisure, consumption, and communication” is apt in describing the trifecta of themes in which Martin Parr explores through his saturated and gluttonous vistas of humanities seemingly inexorable appetite. Parr’s seminal work, shot documentary style in rich hues on the beaches of New Brighton in the nineteen-eighties, captured an aura of man as beast in a dog-eat-dog false paradise; a notion propagated by the common belief that force feeding yourself to oblivion was good and fine for society. The book, entitled Last Resort, which has just been rereleased by Dewi Lewis Publishing–this time with an added forward–put Martin Parr on the map. READ MORE >>>

Dover Street Market window installation by Rei Kawakubo to celebrate the launch of a small collection of T-shirts in collaboration with Matt Groening. www.doverstreetmarket.com