Salvador Dalí (1904-89), more performer and personality than artist, is well-known for his flamboyantly flimsy, metaphysical Surrealist paintings. The art critic Jed Perl succinctly summed him up as “the Liberace of modern art.” But Dalí was also a designer of textiles, perfume bottles, cognac labels, stamps, magazine advertisements, airline ashtrays, and Hallmark greeting cards — not all of them sleazy or half-bad. And he performed in television commercials. In his book “The Dalí Renaissance,” Michael Taylor suggests that his best role was in a commercial for a Swiss chocolate company, “during which [Dalí] rolled his eyes roguishly and said, ‘I am mad, I am completely mad — for Lavin chocolate,’ at which point the two antennae-like points of his mustache began to beat furiously like the wings of a hummingbird.”

Mr. Taylor reminds us that Dalí, seeing no distinction between high and low art, vehemently defended his commercial work: “I am a man of the Renaissance. … I would sign a pair of pants if someone commissioned me to. After all,” Dalí continued, “Michelangelo designed the uniforms for the [pope’s] Swiss Guards. … As a Renaissance man … I feel no separation between myself as an artist and the mass of the people. I stand ready to design anything the people want.”

Trying his hand at practically anything led Dalí to work with film directors, designing truly Surreal, moving, and memorable film sequences for Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Dalí’s work in film is his most substantial contribution to the arts, and the exhibition “Dalí: Painting and Film” (June 29-September 15) will explore the role cinema played in the artist’s oeuvre.

Compare Dalí’s films to another truly Surreal body of work: the sculptures — especially the creepy, spindly “Spiders” — of the French-born artist Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911), whose retrospective opens at the Guggenheim on June 27. Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures tend to work best outdoors, which is where you can see “Monumental Sculpture of Henry Moore.” The largest outdoor exhibition of Moore’s sculptures in America, it will feature 20 major pieces throughout the 250-acre grounds of the New York Botanical Garden (May 24-November 2).

And opening at MoMA on May 21 is a show devoted to the industrial-chic, black-and-white photographs by the German husband and wife team Bernd and Hilla Becher. Subtitled “Landscape/Typology,” the exhibition presents their large grim portraits of mines and steel mills; the show runs until August 25. On the heels of “Dada” comes “Dada at MoMA,” (May 21­-July 28). The exhibit coincides with the launch of the museum’s publication “Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art.” And MoMA’s “Focus: Picasso Sculpture,” with a full range of the Spaniard’s shape-shifting works in assemblage, plaster, and bronze, should prove to be one of this summer’s great indoor pleasures (June 13-November 8).

Also in June, MoMA will inaugurate a series of newly opened galleries on the second floor with “Geo/Metric: Prints and Drawings From the Collection.” Based on the press release, the exhibition will feature the work of some magnificent early-20th-century abstractionists. But then the show appears to take an about-face. The curators — rather than actually explore the ongoing language of geometric abstraction — will attempt, in a this-begot-that revisionism, to link the work of the Bauhaus and the Russian Constructivists to the, relatively speaking, lifeless geometries of Minimalism and beyond. MoMA is also exploring Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Berlin street scenes, a series he created between 1913 and 1915 (August 3-November 10); and, in “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” the museum is surveying the prefabricated home — past, present, and future — in a show that features five actual homes erected on MoMA’s vacant west lot (July 20-October 20).

If MoMA’s exhibition of the spare photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher is too desolate for your taste, check out the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photographic survey “Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940.” The Met’s show will feature nearly 150 prints by 13 of the greatest early modern photographers, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Brassai, and Henri Cartier-Bresson (June 3-September 1). And also opening at the Met are “J.M.W. Turner,” the largest retrospective of the artist’s work ever to be mounted in America (July 1-September 21), and “Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure From the Palaces of Europe,” which will most certainly compete with the Met’s recent embarrassments of riches devoted to Prague, Venice, the Islamic World, and Saint Petersburg. Care for something a little less visually stimulating — a little more minimal? Check out the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s show “Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting” (July 11-September 14).

On an up-note, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is mounting “After Nature,” a group show that explores “visions of the end and the wilderness of the future” (July 17-September 21). Certainly, contemporary artists’ visions of the future and their ideas about our hope, or lack thereof, for survival, will prove to be different from those of futurist architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller (1885-1983), to whom the Whitney is devoting an exhibition (June 26-September 21). The Whitney is also dedicating a show to the American artist Paul McCarthy (b. 1945). Mr. McCarthy’s often stomach-churning physical performances and very messy artworks have utilized the body as paintbrush, the artist’s bodily fluids, and the insertion of a Barbie doll in the artist’s rectum (not necessarily in that order). The Whitney’s exhibition, “Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement Three Installations, Two Films,” if nothing else, should prove provocative (June 26-October 12).

Mr. McCarthy’s shenanigans, as well as Fuller’s space-age pods, however, may not be to your taste. (If you’re like me, a little Salvador Dalí goes a hell of a long way.) And museums — increasingly taking the public’s temperature, through surveys and the Internet, regarding the success of what they show, don’t show, or might show — are making it clear that the public’s opinions matter.

Enter the innovative and imaginative Brooklyn Museum, which has substantially cut its curatorial staff, substantially increased attendance, and attracted younger audiences and more people of color. Filed under the heading “DIY” comes an exhibition that reflects museums’ increasing bang-for-buck business savvy, as well as their growing nervousness about how well they perform competitively and whether or not they are actually giving the public what it wants.

In a sweeping act of community outreach, the Brooklyn Museum is mounting a large show of photography. “Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition” — perhaps the wave of the future — is the Brooklyn Museum’s first publicly curated show. But why stop at curatorial? Maybe the director of the Brooklyn Museum, Arnold Lehman, as well as the Brooklyn Museum trustees, would be willing to step down and to offer their posts to the public — a “director/trustee for a day” kind of position. That way, getting exactly what they want when they want it, the public could skip the museum middlemen entirely.