Left: Artist Richard Mosse. Right: New Museum trustee Toby Devan Lewis with artist Sarah Sze and author Siddhartha Mukherjee. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)

IF MASSIMILIANO GIONI’S “Encyclopedic Palace” for the Fifty-Fifth Venice Biennale was anchored by “a desire to see and know everything,” the lunch that Metro Pictures and Pinocateca Agnelli threw for Cindy Sherman on soggy May 30 signified a desire to see and know everyone.

Held at the Byzantine-era Palazzo Malipiero—ground zero for a randy eighteenth-century teen named Giacomo Casanova—the buffet attracted enough boldface personalities to do any tenacious aristocrat proud. Yet the palazzo’s current owner, a stiffly coiffed blonde with narrow eyes, was unimpressed by the presence of Gioni and other star curators (Francesco Bonami, Caroline Bourgeois, Nicholas Cullinan) seated in her elegant salon with artists Miroslaw Balka, Sarah Sze, and Laurie Simmons; dealers Larry Gagosian, Philomene Magers, Lorcan O’Neill, and Philippe Ségalot; and collectors Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Maja Hoffmann, Marie Josée Kravis, Marella Agnelli, and Neda Young. “Lunch is finished!” the imperious owner said when she spotted drinks set on her carefully conserved antiques.

That sent a bunch of us out on the rain-swept San Samuele dock in search of a water taxi or vaporetto. Much to our surprise, a nearly empty, red-upholstered art boat showed up instead. On this welcome innovation supplied by the city, anyone holding a Biennale pass could ride express to the Punta della Dogana, San Giorgio Maggiore island, or the Giardini, though that was the only time I saw it all week.

Left: Jewish Museum deputy director for exhibitions and public programs Jens Hoffmann. Right: Guggenheim Foundation deputy director Ari Wiseman with dealers Andrew Kreps and Anton Kern.

It was such a good day to stay inside that I headed to the Arsenale, where Gioni’s look back over a hundred years of obsessive artmaking caught up to the digital age. “Loved the Arensale!” I kept hearing people say. “Best fucking Biennale ever,” was another refrain. I also heard “Awful thesis, interesting surprises.” “It’s all rubbish,” said a friend who was finally won over by the tragic beauty of a two-hundred-year-old Vietnamese temple erected by Danh Vo.

The great irony of spending days immersed in a Biennale built on accumulated pools of information is being cut off from the Internet and any other source of English-language news, except notoriously interpretive word-of-mouth. That leaves one blissfully ignorant of the outside world while seeing into its heart solely through the immediate artworks and architecture, inducing a sense of exile and of being in tune with a moment in which nothing else exists. It’s a little like being on drugs.

At the Arsenale, I felt swept up by the rhythms of a show that burbled, swelled, and eddied like the waters in the Venetian lagoon, navigating by turns from the sunny to the dark and back again. Though Gioni put forward artists he has shown at the New Museum—Paweł Althamer, Rosemarie Trockel, and a few from “Ostalgia” and “Ghosts in the Machine”—he managed to leap across generations, cultures, and media for an accounting of the visible as created, catalogued, or altered through human deliberation.

There was little to outrage or discourage here, more to intrigue, puzzle, or appeal. A room that paired Prabhavathi Meppayil’s copper-wire paintings with the late Channa Horwitz’s intricately composed linear progressions fell in the last group. Judging from how hard it was to get into the room, so did the Ed Atkins video. Still, the intense attention paid to Camille Henrot’s flash of a creation-story video made her win of the Silver Lion for best new artist almost predictable.

Left: Artists Sarah Sze and Cindy Sherman. Right: Artist Ryan Trecartin.

Sherman’s pivotal turn as guest curator midway through the show succeeded on several levels at once, displaying the fascinations of the human body in art as well as source material for one of our most influential artists. No one in the cavelike Ryan Trecartin/Lizzie Fitch lounge would give up a set of headphones, so I watched in silence, grateful for a chance to sit down. Though warned by critic Blake Gopnik that it was “not for the squeamish,” I found Italian artist Yuri Ancarani’s microsurgery video utterly captivating, almost against my will. At the end of the Arsenale, the bronze rods set across the floor by Walter De Maria paid off as a visual recitative that met its match outside, where the uniformed band in Ragnar Kjartansson’s dinghy, the S.S. Hangover, played a diurnal dirge by ex–Sigur Rós composer Kjartan Sveinsson that was the musical equivalent of a setting sun.

It was almost a shock to realize it was time for the evening’s brace of parties in every part of Venice. The Turkish pavilion reception for Ali Kazma at the Metropole gave no hint of the protests unfolding in Istanbul. At a nearby dock, impatience, rain, and wind got the better of me before the boat to Eva Presenhuber/303 Gallery/David Kordansky’s fete for Swiss artist Valentin Carron on Isola Vignole arrived, and I bolted for the Regen Projects/Andrea Rosen/Marion Dana/Sprüth Magers dinner for Trecartin and Fitch at the sanitized Bauer Palladio on the Giudecca.

Did I mention that Venice is one place in Italy where bad food is more common than good? There are exceptions, but this was not one of them. On the other hand, the company was pretty smart: museum people from West Coast and East, collectors, dealers—basically the same people I’d seen every day, only in a different context. On a yacht docked before the Casa dei Tre Oci, a few hundred feet away, the Moscow-based V-A-C Foundation was holding an even grander dinner for artists Paweł Althamer and Anatoly Osmolovsky that attracted the Europeans—collectors Dakis Joannou and Diana Picasso, Tate director Nicholas Serota, and artist Tacita Dean, whom I followed to the Trussardi-in-Venice rave celebrating the Milanese foundation’s tenth anniversary in the cavernous Tese dell’Arsenale.

Left: Sotheby's VP Lisa Dennison with collector Ellen Dennison. Right: Dealer Augusto Arbizo.

After all the official gallery and pavilion dinners, this party was a liberation. It welcomed everyone, even Leonardo DiCaprio, and had no agenda other than fun. What else made it so good? The giveaways by artists previously given exhibitions by the foundation—gloppy bouquets of iced layer cakes stubbed with chocolate cigarettes by Maurizio Cattelan, Dean’s keychains bearing double-sided portraits of Gioni and Beatrice Trussardi. Some said the carpeting made all the difference. Others pointed to the DJ, Jarvis Cocker, who helped keep the crowd on its feet till the wee hours—6 AM, I heard the next day.

I might have stayed past 1 AM, but Alex Hertling and Daniele Balice were hosting another dance party at the tiny Piccolo Mondo in Dorsoduro. Thanks to the club’s violently tempered bouncers, there was a bigger crowd in the narrow street outside than on the dance floor inside, but it was all the same party and it too went on most of the night.

Morning came too soon, but I made it to “Padiglione Crepaccio”—a three-day exhibition for ten young Venetian artists organized by Milanese curator Caroline Corbetta and Yoox.com in a private seventeenth-century house—in time for a delicious (at last!) pasta lunch. Corbetta fashioned the show after Il Crepaccio, the store-window gallery in Milan inspired by Cattelan and Gioni’s Family Business Gallery in New York. The idea was to give some attention to Venetian artists neglected by the international scene. All had gone to art school in Venice and stayed; only one was over thirty, and two—Marco Gobbi and Caterina Rossato—were standouts. None had galleries in Venice, but all were selling through Yoox, where their work will be offered throughout the six-month run of the Biennale. This was a new world hidden inside the old one, a future that is arriving right now.

Left: Television personality Victoria Cabelo and Il Crepaccio curator Caroline Corbetta. Right: Artists Luca Migliorini, Valentina Roselli, Serena Vestrucci, Massimiliano Gottardi, and Barbara Prenka.

The opening week was winding down and there was still much to be done. I stopped by the new Louis Vuitton store in San Marco, where Tony Oursler’s video update of Pompeo Marino Molmenti’s 1879 painting La Morte di Otello was debuting; spent the cocktail hour with friends at Harry’s Bar; and dashed to the Eleven Rivington Gallery dinner at the Locanda Montin for Icelandic artist Katrin Sigurdardóttir, whose architectural intervention in the former laundry of Palazzo Zenobio was one of the Biennale’s better collateral events.

Another was The Enclave, Irish pavilion artist Richard Mosse’s multiscreen film documenting the lives of young soldiers in Congo, a sobering treatment of war that was all the more disturbing for its visual splendor. On Saturday, Jack Shainman’s boisterous birthday lunch for Mosse at Trattoria alla Madonna came shortly after the Golden Lion ceremony at the Giardini. Somehow it made the whole week feel less like a contest of national wills ruled by party envy than the reunion of a hugely extended family bound by the strength of its arguments. This Biennale hasn’t raised so many, at least not yet.

“It’s a container that used to hold life,” Sigurdardóttir said of her work at the Zenobio. “And what you have left is a container with an interesting surface.” This Biennale was that.

— Linda Yablonsky

Left: Artist Yuri Ancarani. Right: SculptureCenter director Mary Ceruti with artist Katrin Sigurdardóttir.

Left: Curator Simon Castets and MoCA North Miami curator Alex Gartenfeld. Right: Dealer Jack Shainman.

Left: W editor in chief Stefano Tonchi with artists Elizabeth Peyton and Ragnar Kjartansson. Right: Artist Christian Rosa.

Left: Carnegie International cocurator Daniel Baumann with dealer Toby Webster. Right: Curator Elena Geuna.

Left: Collectors Marty and Rebecca Eisenberg with Maria Blum and dealer Tim Blum. Right: Collector Richard Massey.

Left: Artspace cofounder Chris Vroom. Right: Artist Alexander May with Warhol Museum director Eric Shiner.

Left: Artists John Currin and Rachel Feinstein with author Siddhartha Mukherjee. Right: Austrian president Hans Fischer.

Left: Philanthropist Marieluise Hessel and Edwin Artztz. Right: Collectors Mera Rubell and Don Rubell.

Left: Artist Ryan McNamara and MoMA PS1 curator Jenny Schlenzka. Right: Dealer Carole Green and artist Craig Kalpakjian.

Left: Dealer Simon Preston and artist Koray Duman. Right: Dealer Glenn Scott Wright.

Left: Sotheby's Tobias Meyer and dealer Mark Fletcher. Right: Dealer Franco Noero with curator Ludovico Pratesi.

Left: Dealer Sarah Watson. Right: Dealers Mary Cherry, Roger Tatley, and Alison Jacques.

Left: Ballroom Marfa cofounder Fairfax Dorn, collector Rosette Delug, and Marilyn Heston. Right: Artist Laura Kaplan.