THIS PAST SUMMER, insiders met outsiders at the 55th Venice Biennale—both in the bracing anthropological and ethnographic admixtures of curator Massimiliano Gioni’s central exhibition, “The Encyclopedic Palace,” and in the panoply of social, political, and aesthetic exchanges transpiring throughout the national pavilions of the Giardini and beyond. Artforum invited seven distinguished curators, critics, and scholars—LYNNE COOKE, PAMELA M. LEE, BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH, CLAIRE BISHOP, OKWUI ENWEZOR, DANIEL BIRNBAUM, and NEGAR AZIMI—to capture these dynamic convocations. Rounding out the survey, art historian THOMAS CROW visits “When Attitudes Become Form” at Venice’s Fondazione Prada, where another kind of commutation—the remaking of the historic 1969 exhibition of the same title—forced old and new, extant and ephemeral, into charged proximity.