VENICE—Going around the Biennale exhibitions, I’ve started to notice a rather eerie theme. The skull is so ubiquitous here as to seem a sort of mascot, albeit perhaps an inauspicious one. The Robert Storr-curated exhibition in the Arsenale includes Paolo Canevari's 2007 video of a kid playing soccer with a skull. Then there are Angelo Filomeno's paintings made from sequins on canvas, which show skeletons in strange, lunar-looking landscapes. The skull is also implied by Leon Ferrari's sculpture of a suspended mass of bones.

In the Giardini, there is Hyungkoo Lee in the Korean pavilion, whose skulls and miniature, doll-like skeletons are, he has written, a response to Asian male's complexes over their smallness of stature. The Spanish pavilion contains Manuel Vilariño's photographs of skulls. At the German pavilion, one of Isa Genzken’s collocations of found objects—suitcases, photographs, mannequins, etc.—contains a human skull wearing a sequined carnival mask.

There are also two off-site skulls of note—the larger-than-life outdoor one made by Indian artist Sudobh Gupta of stainless steel cooking vessels that stares down your vaporetto as it glides past Palazzo Grassi—and, a precursor to all of the above, the preserved human head in one of the Wunderkammern that make up the exhibition  "Artempo" at the Palazzo Fortuny: a leathery, tattooed fellow, who still sports his shaggy hair and beard.

And outside the city, there’s the other skull on everyone's mind—the one that Brit art star Damien Hirst encrusted with some 19 million pounds worth of diamonds, news of which broke just days before the Biennale opened.

In Storr's Arsenale show, an entire room functioned as a sort of memento mori, with a mini-room containing Filomeno's skeletons and another one containing Jan Christiaan Braun's photographs of graveyards flanked by two walls of Yang Zhenzhong's video installation I Will Die (2000–05), in which people utter this statement to the camera in their native tongue. Some say it exuberantly, others are solemn, others have more complex reactions. It is a moving piece.  

Of course, there is much more to the Biennale than these mementos mori—like the anticipation of the next big art event. As I write, the art world is rushing on to Basel. The Venice-Basel-Documenta-Muenster "Grand Tour" is handily caricatured on the entrance wall to the Arsenale, in a cartoon by Dan Perjovschi. A stick figure gazes at a single painting representing Venice, a salon-style bunch of paintings representing Basel (where dealers sometimes show works this way in their booths), an upside-down painting (documenta, a show rumored to be idea-driven), and a painting mounted on a plinth (the Sculpture Projects Muenster, where public sculptures are placed throughout the city).

And so, on to Basel we go.