The canyon light is the reason any of this exists. Painters came for it a century ago and never really left, and every summer the hillside above Laguna Canyon Road fills with open-air galleries showing what that light still does to people. More than a hundred and forty artists work here — paintings, photography, sculpture, ceramics, jewelry — and most of them stand beside their own work, which means you get to ask the question you always want to ask in a museum and are never allowed to. Demonstrations run through the day. Live music underneath it. This has been happening on the same grounds since 1932, long enough that the show is older than most of the town around it, and the Pageant of the Masters shares the campus. Go with someone who looks at the work instead of the snack line, and lose the whole afternoon to it.