WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing was one of the seminal avant-garde publications of the 1970s and early 1980s. It had a quirky, prescient editorial sensibility and was a dynamic venue for graphic design experimentation. WET was a precursor to, and exemplar for, later publications such as Beach Culture, Ray Gun, Wired, and the like. Talents such as Matt Groening (The Simpsons) and others published their first work here. This book tells the story of the making of WET from its early formation in the Venice Beach creative milieu to its emergence on the international pop-culture scene. This book includes an extended commentary on the process of making WET, along with images and reprints from the magazine. No mere retrospective, this book offers instructive advice for anyone embarking on a journey of artistic entrepreneurship. Leonard Koren, who trained as an artist and architect, was a founding member of The Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a wall-painting collective. In 1976 he created WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, an avant-garde publication seminal in the development of postmodern aesthetics. Koren has subsequently written numerous books about art, design, and aesthetics. among them are Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (the classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete), What Artists Do, and Musings of a Curious Aesthete.
