When Leonard Koren, a graduate of UCLA’s School of Architecture, founded WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing in 1976, he vowed never to take it seriously. Published over a period of 5 years, the 84 issues of WET regularly featured art, music, fashion, nudity, and hot water-related phenomena.

Groucho Marx as Village Priest: For over 25 years, artist Robert "Baza" Alexander (1923–87) and his unorthodox, Venice Beach-based ministry the Temple of Man performed rites of art, poetry, roller-skate weddings, and good deeds that embodied Wallace Berman's well-known maxim "Art is Love is God."

In 1965, when Larry Bell arrived in New York from Southern California to begin work on the exhibition at the Pace Gallery that would define his career, Minimal art was in full swing. At that time most of the major artists associated with this movement were in New York. The galvanized-steel cubes of Judd, the L-shaped beams of Morris, the die-cut “alloy planes” of Andre...