Courtesy photo Venice Art Walk & Auctions

Google's Venice offices, in Frank Gehry's "binoculars" building

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Google...It's everywhere. And in late 2010, Google set up camp in Frank Gehry's cherished "binoculars" building in Venice Beach amidst the marijuana clinics, fire-eaters, and snake charmers.

Last year, Google reached out to the Venice Family Clinic and offered to sponsor the annual Venice Art Walk & Auctions benefit and host the silent auction at the landmark building. Many Venetians were wary of the corporate presence and its involvement, while others welcomed the imminent nouveau regime.

At this year's 34th annual event, on Sunday, May 19, Google has taken center stage, providing not only the gallery for the auction but also hosting the "family fun day." "The Venice area is home to a lot of Google employees who are happy to be involved for the second year in a row," says Thomas Williams, engineering director and Google L.A. site lead.

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Courtesy Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND)

One of Liz Craft's "hairy guys" in West Hollywood Park

This week, two artists dance with hula-hoops, another uses graffiti to obscure paintings of high-heeled, made-up models and a third installs hairy bronze statues in WeHo.

5. Just say no
In 1962, Judson Dance Theater started at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village. Programming was informal; writers and artists contributed as much as dancers and choreographers did. Trisha Brown worked at Judson, as did Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, who developed her No Manifesto there. ("No to spectacle. No to virtuosity," it started, then continued to list all the tropes of performance Rainer wished to reject.) Rainer and Forti will be at the Hammer this weekend, along with a number of other artists, dancers, theorists and historians, talking about where the dance world and art world meet. 10899 Wilshire Blvd.; Fri., April 26, 5-9 p.m.; Sat., April 27, 10-2 p.m. (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.

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Photo by Stefanie Keenan

LACMA Director Michael Govan and members of the Collectors Committee look at Mother and Child Figure, a sculpture from Mali that's around 500 years old

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The Resnick Pavilion, the newest building and the only single-story one on the Los Angeles County Museum's campus, was closed to the public this weekend. But if you looked in the window, you would have seen 30 gray monuments, some thigh-high, some as tall as two people, all roughly obelisk-shaped like the Washington monument. They were arranged in straight lines and striking. People kept trying to go in, even though a sign outside the Resnick told them they couldn't.

Artist Sam Durant made these gray obelisks as part of his 2005 project, Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington D.C., basing his shapes on those of actual monuments scattered across the U.S., marking spots where Native Americans and white settlers died as the result of bloody battles and massacres from the time of colonization onward. Durant proposes moving these to the National Mall, and has built a balsa wood model showing what that might look like.

The reason you couldn't walk in and around Durant's monuments was that LACMA did not own them yet. The Collectors Committee, a group of 77 dues-paying members, had not yet decided whether they would foot the bill.

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Courtesy of LACMA

View into the second gallery of "Ends and Exits"

This week, it's all about looking back: One artist revisits 1993 L.A., another borrows the palette of teen pop from 20-some years ago and a museum show features graphically bold, grittily political art of the '80s.

5. What art even is
When the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston changed its name from Institute of Modern Art in 1948, controversy erupted. One publication said the name change signaled the institute's rejection of the "cult of bewilderment" that abstract modernism represented. A group of artists, the iconic Jackson Pollock among them, went to New York to protest the institute soon after. Art historian Richard Meyer tells this story and others about the birth of "contemporary art," a designation no less bewildering than "modern art" ever was, in his new book What Was Contemporary Art? He'll talk about the book and that question with MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch in the museum's Ahmanson Auditorium. 250 S. Grand Ave., dwntwn.; Sat., March 30, 3 p.m.; free. (213) 626-6222, moca.org.

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Courtesy Roberts & Tilton

A view of Noah Davis' Stacked Cubicles (2013)

This week, another painted portrait of Kate Middleton debuts, an aesthetic terroist talks about fashion and tea time happens ten days in a row in Chinatown.

5. Man and the machine
Llyn Foulkes, the rash, visceral artist who has a solo show at the Hammer Museum now, also plays what he calls The Machine. It's a multi-part instrument that surrounds him when he performs, sitting amidst bass drum, symbols, xylophone and other brass and rubber horns. Filmmakers Tamar Halpern and Christopher Quilty have been making a documentary about Foulkes called One Man Band, a name inspired by the artist's Machine. They'll screen it as a work-in-progress at the Hammer and answer questions afterward. 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Wstwd.; Thurs., March 21, 7:30 p.m. (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.

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Courtesy Overduin and Kite

Will Benedict, 1 800 Bad Drug (2013)

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*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, a designer explains happiness in West Hollywood, a fact-blurring foreign correspondent's office opens in Highland Park and a single tear rolls down one cheek in Culver City.

5. High-tech domesticity
T. Kelly Mason's Typology of Glasses shows a line of casual-looking glassware painted against a baby blue background. The painting is inside a light box, backlit by gels and covered with glass. Above that glass, Mason has outlined his glassware in marker, so that the drawing begins to seem almost dimensional. This mix of high-tech and low recurs throughout his current show at Cherry and Martin gallery, and makes idiosyncratic domestic scenes flashy in a funny way. 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd.; through April 27. (310) 559-0100, cherryandmartin.com.

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Courtesy OCMA

Richard Jackson's Blue Room (2011)

This week, one artist makes paintings that smear and explode while another makes an ancient monument look lively and a third installs a Dutch living room in a storefront.

5. The better to hear you with
Elana Mann, who has spent the last few years thinking about how to make listening and hearing more active than passive, built three outdoor acoustic sculptures that look loosely like horns. They will be part of "Listening as (a) Movement," on view for the next two months at Sidestreet Projects, an art space run out of a bus that's typically parked in a vacant Pasadena lot. This week, composer Allison Johnson uses Mann's sculpture to perform Decay/Decode, an ensemble piece that also involves Morse code and sign language. It sounds strange and a little elusive, but it probably won't feel that way. Mann's good at making big ideas welcoming. 730 N. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena; Fri., March 8, 6-10 p.m. (323) 225-0911, sidestreet.org.

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Neyda Paredes

La Ribot's Laughing Hole performed in 2007

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This week, an array of icons -- cowboys, the president, an unforgettable AIDS activist -- appear in art on view and three performers laugh all afternoon at LACMA.

5. Art detective
Victoria Reed is curator for provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which means she tracks down the origins of suspicious artworks. She has investigated lost, smuggled or looted masterpieces; brushed art for Nazi fingerprints; and recently returned art stolen half a century or more ago to a family in Poland and a museum in Trento in Italy. She'll talk about her work at the Getty. 1200 Getty Center Drive; Thurs., Feb. 28, 7 p.m.; free, reservations recommended. (310) 440-7300, getty.edu.

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18th Steet Arts

An installation by Ivan Argote and Pauline Bastard, who organized "Born to Curate"

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*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, there's a game show-style showdown in Santa Monica, a print fair at LACMA and a film that tours through facets of pre-invasion Baghdad showing in Eagle Rock.

5. Justin Bieber's leftovers
Art Is Shit Editions, a fairly young, L.A.-based art publishing company that produces objects as well as prints, has in its inventory a gold-glazed, headless Virgin Mary Vase by artist Wynn Bauer. It also has a sculpture, made entirely of chocolate, of a brown banana in a hot dog bun. Artist XVALA purportedly made the first of this editioned sculpture, called Justin Bieber's Banana Split: A Memento for Celebrity Exes, based on two moldy items he found when rifling through the star's residential trash. Art Is Shit, or AIS, will be among the exhibitors at the third annual L.A. Print Fair at LACMA this weekend. Its founders will discuss their work on a panel with Karen Fiorito of Buddha Cat Press, another irreverent L.A. publisher, at 4:45 Saturday. Brown Auditorium, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; Sat., Feb. 23, 12:30-5 p.m.; free. (323) 857-6010, lacma.org.

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Courtesy Young Projects

Still from Ulu Braun's The Park (2011)

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*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, a new gallery debuts on Melrose, a film by and about a lover of life screens in West Adams and a light show plays out in a corner in Culver City.

5. Mind games
When artist James Turrell rented out Ocean Park's old Mendota Hotel in 1966, he famously turned the rooms into perfect, white boxes with no outside light sources. Then he started experimenting, projecting different colored lights and trying to change the way the space felt. Some of his experiments resulted in his Cross-Corner Projection series, where he would project two planes of light into a corner in such a way that it would look like there was a solid shape in the room with you, or it would look like there was an opening you could fall into. The effect would change as you moved around. Sometimes, the light seemed to be inside the room and sometimes it seemed to be shining in from some mysterious portal to the outside. One early Cross-Corner Projection, a pinkish-orange one shaped like tetrahedron, is on view now at Nye+Brown in Culver City. 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd.; through Feb. 23. (310) 559-5215, nyeplusbrown.com.

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