ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, New York — This weekend, the art-world descended upon Bard’s sylvan campus in the Hudson Valley to celebrate the Center for Curatorial Studies’s 20-year anniversary. For the occasion, CCS pulled out all the stops, plying attendees with two rigorous museum shows, a series of panel discussions, a book launch, in situ performances, and generous libations of food and drink.

Arriving in medias res Saturday morning, I caught a heated panel discussion on alternative spaces. Stephan Kalmar of New York’s Artists Space and Lukasz Gorczyca of Warsaw’s Raster treated the audience to a bonafide art-administrator showdown over cultural institutions’ collusion with the market. Alex Sainsbury, director of London’s Ravens Row, fatalistically opined, “Art will die because it’s too expensive to live in the city these days…Culture is the market now.”

The conversation may have been sobering, but the crowd — which over the weekend included Liam Gillick, Sarah Morris, Gavin Brown, Adam Lindemann, and a mafia of A-list curators including Elisabeth Sussman, Paul Schimmel, and Lauren Cornell — didn’t let that harsh their elite-summer-camp mellow. Outside Bard’s Hessel Museum, performers in white tights blitzed the chatty, wine-sipping coterie with a guerilla recitation of Sophocles’ “Antigone.” Directed by Chelsea Knight and Elise Rasmussen, the piece was part of the performance-heavy exhibition “Anti-Establishment,” curator Johanna Burton’s millennial answer to Institutional Critique.

Inside, Swedish anarcha-feminist collective Yes Association, consecrated the “Hannah Arendt Smoking Area” by reading texts, pouring dirt on the floor, and devouring raw onions. A highlight was H.E.N.S’s perversely funny “Alternative Pedagogy and New Left Daycare” installation, complete with adult-sized baby bouncers, sock puppets spouting Marxist theory, and a Felix Gonzales-Torres-style pyramid of juice boxes. Next-door were Jacqueline Humphries’s neon black light paintings, which the catalogue aptly touted as “the Rothko Chapel transformed into a nightclub.”

The headliner, “From 199A to 199B: Liam Gillick,” curated by CCS director Tom Eccles, highlighted the British artist’s work during the ‘90s. “There’s this notion about how Liam Gillick is a conceptual artist,” Eccles said. “But let’s examine that. He’s not easy, but why would you want it easy?” Visitors were confronted by a gigantic German text, translated as, “So were people this dumb before television?” Under the sign of degraded intelligence, guests helped themselves to glasses of Jameson. By dint of an ingenious act of curation, the variably playful and inscrutable artworks included a tent in a paneled room inset with halogen lights set to a looped recording Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” Gillick bookended the exhibition with a dejected text piece from 1993, reading, “The significance of the structure is still dependent upon structures outside art which I am too lazy to challenge.” (“1993 was the worst year,” Gillick admitted.)

I asked the artist whether he minded being grouped under the umbrella of “relational aesthetics.” Gillick wryly replied, “The only thing worse than being associated with a group that can be shutdown, is not having ever been related to something. I also emerged in Britain in the ‘80’s, so I get two crappy groups.” After dinner and an avant-garde dance show, the crowd congregated at Olafur Eliasson’s island installation “Parliament of Reality” where the festivities carried on into the night.  Say what you will, relational aesthetics knows how to party.