Charles Venable

“Evening with the Stars brings together the best ballet dancers in the world that we would never have a chance to see here,” says Travis DiNicola of Indy Reads. “It’s the must-see event of the year.”

Also: The IMA’s recently wed director, Charles Venable, announced his organization’s opposition this week to the proposed gay-marriage ban.

“Everybody who is anybody has their weddings there,” says Zach Adamson about Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, says Charles Venable about New York City, “We wanted a civil service. There is a chapel-like room in the city clerk’s office. You’re not just handed a piece of paper, which is really nice.”

The IMA’s new Contemporary Design Gallery has the largest collection of modern design in the United States, boasting hundreds of pieces from three different eras.

City-county councilman Zach Adamson and partner Christian Mosburg flew to Washington D.C. today, only partly by choice: The two can’t tie the knot in their home state, so they’re going where same-sex marriages are legally recognized.

“What didn’t happen is enough people showing up to populate the structure we had built,” Venable says. But “Art is not for everybody,” says one IMA critic. “Art is for anybody, which is very different.”

Will the value the IMA’s curators provide—challenging our thinking with shows like Ai Weiwei’s, telling us what art we should be clamoring for—continue as the museum is democratized?

Freiman’s impending evaporation from Indy is the latest move at the IMA, where relatively new director and CEO Charles Venable, who started in October 2012, has made an array of changes.