The Artist in the CountercultureHow California's counterculture of the 1960s to 1980s profoundly shapedand was shaped byWest Coast artists The 1960s exert a special fascination in modern art. However, most accounts miss the defining impact of the period's youth culture, largely incubated in California, on artists who came of age in that decade. As their prime exemplar, Bruce Conner, reminisced, "I did everything that everybody did in 1967 in the Haight Ashbury I would take peyote