“Scalable City” by Sheldon Brown.

OK, gang, we all know times are tough.

Here are a couple of FREE art shows in Orange County that will expand your mind, and keep your wallet intact.

UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology is presenting “Scalable Relations,” an exhibition of digital art created by faculty of the multi-campus UC Digital Arts Research Network. The group of exhibits, curated by the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Christiane Paul, explore the connectivity and evolving relations enabled by digital technologies.

Artists at the Beall Center will include Sheldon Brown, George Legrady and Angus Forbes. The show opens Friday Jan. 9 and runs through March 14, with an artists reception scheduled for 6:30-9 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 8.

The Beall Center is on the UCI campus, near the corners of Campus and West Peltason. For more information, call 949-824-4339 or visit http://beallcenter.uci.edu.

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Perhaps you’ve heard this already, but the Richard Diebenkorn exhibition scheduled to open at the Orange County Museum of Art in October has been postponed for six months. The reasons appear to be financial.

The Diebenkorn show, which is supposed to feature 60 paintings an works on paper, is now scheduled to open April 4, 2010.

Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, was an important American artist associated with Abstract Expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement. His later works — the Ocean Park series in particular – were among his best known, and OCMA owns a particularly notable painting, “Ocean Park #36,” a 1970 oil on canvas (pictured). The OCMA show is to focus on his Ocean Park period — the first museum exhibit to do so, according to OCMA.

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“In the Land of Retinal Delights,” a 1968 oil on canvas by Robert Williams.

The clock is ticking on 2008. The new year is right around the corner. But as long as we still have some moments left in 2008, let’s look back at the top 10 art shows in Los Angeles and Orange County. The following are in no particular order (except, perhaps, the first):

-”In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapose Factor,” Laguna Art Museum, June 22-Oct. 5. A far-out show, with lots of colorful, eye-popping work. Probably my favorite exhibition of the year. A side note: Juxtapoz is not the most widely read art magazine in the U.S. ARTnews is. At least, that’s what they tell me.

-The Lazarof Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Jan. 13-present. In a word: amazing. The donation of Picassos, Klees, Kandinskys, Braques and Giacomettis dramatically improved LACMA’s holdings in modern art.

-”California Video,” J. Paul Getty Center, March 15-June 8. A fantastic exhibition, showcasing the depth and variety of the Getty’s video collection, which it largely inherited from the Long Beach Museum of Art.

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Here are the most-viewed Arts Blog stories for each month of 2008. We’ve roughly doubled our traffic since the beginning of the year. Thanks for reading! Got any suggestions about who or what to cover in 2009? Let us know.

January: A career in the theater is a fast track to poverty

February: Clay Aiken charms his critics

March: Pay attention to Yundi Li

April: The Dudamel Dog

May: 19 reasons why I hate ‘A Chorus Line’

June: 2008 Cappies gala was a glitzy showcase of young O.C. talent

July: He is … the most intersting man in the world (the sequel)

August: If Schoenberg were popular

September: Getty reduces hours, raises parking fees

October: Espinosa and Hilty return to ‘Wicked’

November: ‘Wicked’ will someday come to a movie theater near you

December: Clay Aiken, Broadway star

Big news broke Tuesday with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles announcing the resignation of Jeremy Strick, the hiring of a new CEO, Charles E. Young, and the acceptance of billionaire Eli Broad’s $30 million bailout offer. The museum is also kicking off a $75 million fundraising campaign.

Click here for the entire story in The Orange County Register.

And happy holidays!

Previously:
Troubles at MOCA continue

Artist Louise Bourgeois, photographed in 1990 with her marble sculpture “Eye to Eye” (1970). Photo by Raimon Ramis.

You’ve probably heard by now that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is in dire straits financially.

The museum with the spectacular contemporary art collection is operating in the red, has a fraction of the endowment that it had just a few years ago, and is considering a merger with the L.A. County Museum of Art.

Read my review of MOCA’s “Louise Bourgeois” exhibit, plus some details on their current troubles.

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