Culture of Denial

CITY JOURNAL, March 30, 2018

Culture of Denial

DJ Jaffe’s harrowing account of the half-century-long breakdown of America’s treatment of the mentally ill. A review of Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill (Prometheus Books, 363 pp., $25)

“We heard it after Sandy Hook. You heard it after Aurora. You heard it after Arizona. You heard it after Parkland. That these mass shootings are the result of somebody suffering with mental illness and the only thing we can do is address this as a mental illness problem. So let’s get the facts straight right away.” So begins a video spot by Congressman Joe Kennedy III, produced by “NowThis” for Facebook and watched by millions of viewers, that discounts the relationship between mental illness and mass violence. The voices of American liberalism have long refused to acknowledge the slightest connection between the two.

“The attempt to turn the question of gun violence into a question of mental health is obscene,” writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Yet in his next sentence, Gopnik concedes: “Of course, people who kill children en masse are crazy. That’s the given.”

Such atrocities should warrant an examination of root causes and their implications. And, yes, such shooters are often crazy. Kennedy states that “only 22 percent” of mass shootings were “conducted by somebody suffering from mental illness.” The actual numbers may be much higher. The shooters in at least three of the four examples that Kennedy cites displayed symptoms of mental illness. But shouldn’t even a rate of 22 percent suggest further review? And shouldn’t the call for further gun control go hand-in-hand with a reevaluation of our treatment of the mentally ill?  

But, in fact, a culture of denial has long surrounded the half-century-long breakdown of America’s treatment of its mentally ill. As it happens, the Kennedys themselves have long been at the center of this rollback in care for those suffering from extreme mental illness due. In 1941, 23-year-old Rosemary Kennedy, Congressman Kennedy’s great aunt, underwent what was then a widely used treatment—the transorbital, or “ice-pick,” lobotomy. Rosemary’s father, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., the autocratic family scion, believed that the procedure would calm her mood swings, which had become a family embarrassment. Unfortunately, the botched procedure left Rosemary severely mentally disabled. Partly as a consequence, the Kennedy family has embarked on a multi-generational crusade against institutionalization and invasive treatment. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy proposed replacing dedicated institutions for the mentally ill with decentralized Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs). As I described for City Journal in “A New Moral Treatment,” the result not only led to the shuttering of the asylums but also to a near-ban on committing patients for treatment against their will and to prevent them from harming themselves and others.

The madness of this present system of care is the subject of Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill, DJ Jaffe’s harrowing, personal, and all-too-timely account of how a system that now prioritizes “mental health” does little to treat true mental illness. Like many advocates for the severely mentally ill, Jaffe, a self-described “aging hippie” and the founder of the Mental Illness Policy Org, came to his cause through personal experience. In the 1980s, his wife’s sister, Lynn, developed schizophrenia. The diagnosis was bad enough, but the mental health system’s inability to help her, and to help her family help her, proved disastrous. Doctors refused to share findings about her condition. “Lynn returned home to us,” writes Jaffe, “and stopped taking the antipsychotic medications we didn’t even know she’d been prescribed.” Jaffe (an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute) came to realize that the law “prevents parents from helping psychotic or delusional loved ones who refuse treatment until after they become a danger. As ludicrous as it sounds, rather than preventing violence, the law requires it. That realization led me on a thirty-year journey to try to find out what is wrong with the mental health system and what can be done to fix it.”

As Jaffe makes clear, the headline-making cases involving gun violence and mass murder are only the most atrocious symptoms of a much greater systemic failure, one that leads to the expense of billions a year on mental health yet leaves hundreds of thousands of mentally ill Americans to the cruelties of the streets, the “trans-institutionalization” of the prisons, and the life-threatening dangers of their own diseases.

One problem is “anosognosia,” the clinical term for the lack of understanding of one’s own mental fitness. Anosognosia is “present in up to 50 percent of those with untreated schizophrenia and 40 percent of those with untreated bipolar disorder,” writes Jaffe. In a system that relies on patients serving as their own health-care agents and that no longer permits consultation on treatment with parents or loved ones, the consequences of anosognosia mean that the severely mentally ill often go untreated or undertreated. The result: “there are ten times more people with mental illness incarcerated as hospitalized.” Those are just the ones who make it to jail. Thousands die each year by their own hand or are shot by police committing crimes that shouldn’t have happened.

“We should move away from a system that requires tragedy before treatment to one that offers treatment before tragedy,” writes Jaffe. Insane Consequences details the “catch and release attitude” of today’s mental health system and the Kafkaesque trials that concerned family members often endure to protect their loved ones from themselves.

The implications extend far beyond gun violence, to harm of any kind. Consider the subway pusher Andrew Goldstein, whose lack of treatment for schizophrenia led to the death of Kendra Webdale in 1999; a law written in her name now permits at least limited involuntary treatment of the mentally ill. Or Richard Rojas, a driver high on PCP with known psychological issues who rammed his car into pedestrians in Times Square in 2017, injuring 20 and killing 18-year-old Alyssa Elsman.  

Jaffe could go further in advancing the argument for new institutions for those mentally ill who pose such a danger to themselves or others that they should not be integrated into society—a measure with real relevance to the gun debate, for example. Federal law already bans the sale of firearms to people who have been involuntarily committed. Written into existing policy, institutionalization therefore remains a proven path to reducing gun deaths, if only such intervention were still readily available to the severely mentally ill.  

“A lot of kids threw jokes around like that, saying that he’s the one to shoot up the school,” said Eddie Bonilla, a former classmate of Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter. “But it turns out everyone predicted it. It’s crazy.”

Crazy, it is.

Gallery Chronicle (June 2017)

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2017

Gallery Chronicle

On the 2017 Met Gala, “Frieze New York” & “TEFAF New York Spring.”

When it comes to the life of art, there may be nothing less gala than the Met Gala, or at least what this annual boondoggle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has become. The scandal of this year’s iteration should serve as a sobering wake-up call for the increasingly besotted priorities of too many American museums, including our greatest institutions.

If you have not heard of the Met Gala, do not worry. You were not invited. Since 1995, on the first Monday of every May, the Metropolitan has handed its keys over to Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine and the artistic director of Condé Nast. Here her purported aim has been to raise funds for the museum’s Costume Institute—I’m sorry, make that the “Anna Wintour Costume Center.” Her lording over the gala’s invite list has become notorious and the subject of a documentary called The First Monday in May.

Of course, the potential conflicts of interest that exist between Wintour’s commercial concerns and her museum trusteeship are blatant. The specter that she has conjured up with her gala has followed priorities far beyond fundraising and certainly beyond the realm of art. Along the way these extra-artistic interests have risen up from the Institute’s basement galleries to infect not only the museum’s spaces but also its institutional tenor, and by extension the tenor of American museums at large.

Tweet of an image from the 2017 Met Gala

Like much else in the world of art, the Met Gala and the Costume Institute itself have become unrecognizable deformations from the Institute’s founding and the event’s inception in 1946. Consider that for nearly twenty years, from 1979 to 1995, the gala was helmed by the singular society doyenne Patricia Buckley. During this time the Institute mounted exhibitions such as “Fashions of the Hapsburg Era” (1979–1980), “Victorian Dress 1837–1877” (1988–1989), and “The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire” (1989–1990). The historical programming more than fit, so to speak, the seriousness of the institution that presented it.

The Wintour era has wrought, by contrast, “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” and “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” Even beyond its superficial, contemporary turn, Wintour’s Costume Institute has exposed the museum to the predations of celebrity culture. Worse still, the museum as a whole, a once-protected precinct of our cultural inheritance, has learned to revel in Hollywood’s demotic attention. “The Met is a place that you consider very very correct, very formal,” the fashion editor André Leon Talley explains in the Wintour documentary. “Anna has taken that out of the mix.”

Tweet from the 2017 Met Gala by Marc Jacobs

The 2017 Met Gala became the apotheosis of this transformation. With the pop singer Katy Perry serving as the year’s honorary hostess, the hordes of bold-faced names, amply stocked with Jenners and Kardashians, marched up the museum’s Fifth Avenue steps and made a public mockery of the institution. “The celebrities were like animals . . . acting like they were at the Playboy Mansion!” one informant explained to Radar magazine. “Some didn’t even know it was a museum. They thought it was an event space with old stuff brought in to make it look like Egypt!” Many of the attendees, clearly uncertain of their surroundings, came to loiter in the museum restrooms. Here they sprawled out across the floors, spilled drinks, smoked cigarettes, and took “selfie” shots in the mirrors, which they disseminated through social media.

Some may perceive such spectacle as a tolerable distraction—even a welcome frivolity for an overly stuffy and off-putting institution. I fear the pantomime is far more anti-civilizational. It is a takeover—a commercial-grade, mass-culture affront to an institution held in disdain. Guarded by a phalanx of bodyguards, these latter-day vandals take barbarous license amidst the greatest artifacts of history. They smoke. They fornicate. They sprawl across the floors in mockery of the art around them, merely to focus on themselves. And all the while they record their debauchery on social media for millions of fanatics to emulate their cultural annihilation.

There have been many cringe-worthy moments during the reign of Thomas Campbell, the disgraced director of the Metropolitan Museum who departs this month. Perhaps the curator once dubbed “Tapestry Tom” thought he could take a major carpet ride to new money and popular adulation. Instead he opened the floodgates and drowned his institution in ridicule and debt while forsaking his scholars and curators. There should have been only one response for any proper museum steward to this year’s Met Gala: to sweep the trash out of the galleries, and to keep Wintour’s damage deposit with the suggestion never to return. Short of that, Anna Wintour’s Met Gala should be interred alongside Tom Campbell’s ignominious career.

Frieze New York. Photo: Mark Blower / Frieze

The sixth annual art fair known as Frieze New York opened on the same week as the Met’s inanities, but seemed a world apart.1 My first thought upon entering Frieze’s elevating, light-filled tent was how the value of seeing, as opposed to seducing, has been abdicated by many museums to be taken up by commercial galleries, which in turn increasingly coalesce around these quasi-institutional art fairs.

Six years ago I was bullish over the first stateside Frieze, a remarkable art encampment on New York’s Randall’s Island at the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers by the Hell Gate to Long Island Sound. The setting alone is a stunning retreat. Of course, many of us already know this island to be that which exists beneath the roadbed of the Triborough Bridge. There was a time I played after-school sports beneath its dingy overpasses, and I attended a grungy rock festival there in 1994. But one of the surprises of Frieze is how Randall’s Island has been recently transformed into a bucolic sanctuary in the heart of the city with flowering paths and woodpeckers tapping on trees. The first year I took a ferry there. More recently I walked across a footbridge from Manhattan.

Admittedly over the past few years I grew somewhat weary of Frieze’s formula of trendy, transposed eateries and art as lifestyle retreat, mixed with some showboating and the dumbing down of the art on view. Access to Frieze has become increasingly daunting, with inscrutable online directions, unreliable transportation, and the feeling during storms that the whole operation may become a runaway bouncy castle. But this year seemed different, at least once the clouds parted, and far less frivolous—a place set apart, and well engineered, for the contemplation of art in exile.

In 2012 the architecture firm SO-IL designed the Frieze tent from pre-fabricated rental components to snake along the edge of the Harlem River overlooking Manhattan for more than a quarter mile. Made of white translucent material, supplemented by minimal artificial illumination, its 225,000 square feet are awash in natural light. The visual effects can be uncanny, cooling colors and bathing both painting and sculpture in an indirect, northern-like light.

This year many of the two-hundred-plus galleries, brought together from thirty-one countries by Frieze’s London-based curatorial team, took best advantage of these light-filled surroundings not just to give us something to look at, but also something to see, with minimal labels and misdirection. Alexander Gray Associates, with a prominent booth by the southern entrance, singled out a late geometric abstraction by the painter Jack Tworkov called Triptych (Q3-75 #1) (1975), a contemplative fugue of gridded form and spontaneous brushwork. (This Chelsea gallery, it should be noted, is currently showing a survey of the artist Betty Parsons, a central figure of twentieth-century art better known for her singular dealership of the Abstract Expressionists.)

Sculpture by Carol Bove. Photo: Mark Blower / Frieze

Both David Zwirner and Sculpture Center exhibited pas-de-deux sculptures by Carol Bove of scrap metals punctuated by urethane dots. The paintings of Henry Taylor were released from the circus of the Whitney Biennial to show to best effect at Blum & Poe. The Symbolist abstractions of Gabriel Lima were new to me at the Portuguese gallery Múrias Centeno. I liked the worn paint textures of Marina Rheingantz at the Brazilian gallery Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, while the bold lines of James Nares’s abstractions at New York’s Paul Kasmin directed us to the American road. London’s October gallery testified to the modernist innovations of contemporary African art, especially Romuald Hazoumè’s Benin-style masks crafted from gasoline canisters.

There was some regrettable selfie bait, in particular Karl Holmqvist’s sign paintings at Gavin Brown’s “Enterprise” instructing fair-goers to “Hug a Hooker!” Yet these were anomalies in a fair that dedicated much of its real estate to its selection of “Spotlight” galleries exhibiting solo shows of work created exclusively in the last century, which included many of the best booths in the fair: Judith Linhares’s dreamscapes at San Francisco’s Anglim Gilbert, Paul Feeley’s color-forms at New York’s Garth Greenan, and, in particular, Alfred Leslie’s stark portraiture at New York’s Bruce Silverman.

TEFAF New York Spring at the Park Avenue Armory. Photo: TEFAF

A depression in interest for European antiquities may say as much about the state of the European past as it does of the European economy. Founded nearly thirty years ago in Holland, TEFAF Maastricht has long been a preeminent art fair featuring an advertised “7,000 years of art history,” but one particularly known for its selection of Old Masters and antiquities. Looking to expand from Maastricht while educating an American collecting public that may know little beyond the latest Jeff Koons, TEFAF came stateside last fall with a fair that transformed the Park Avenue Armory into an ethereal treasury of art history.

I wish I could stay so enthusiastic for tefaf’s spring edition, which returned to the Armory over “Frieze Week” to exhibit ninety-three galleries showing modern and contemporary art and design.2

Booth at TEFAF New York Spring. Photo: TEFAF

There were some highlights: the New York gallery Hans P. Kraus Jr., dealing in the “old masters of photography,” as always showed a remarkable selection of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century prints. Bernard Goldberg featured scenes by Thomas Hart Benton from his “American Historical Epic” of 1924 through 1927. David Zwirner smartly positioned Josef Albers next to the equal (if not superior) work of his wife, Anni Albers. London’s James Butterwick offered a selection of Russian and Ukrainian modernists, and Lisson featured the Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera, while Bergamin & Gomide focused on South American modernism.

But overall TEFAF New York Spring was a letdown, a largely directionless retread of other modern fairs underscored by an often garish arrangement of work. Once again TEFAF included jewelers and other such retailers in the mix, which gave its fair an aura of the international departures terminal “duty free.” The selection also leaned awkwardly towards postwar European painting, and I can only gather that a memo went out suggesting exhibitors display every sliced-up Lucio Fontana canvas in inventory, rendering the fair both a whodunit slasher and a vagina monologue. Perhaps there’s a future for TEFAF New York Spring. For now I will simply look forward to the opening of TEFAF’s next revelatory fall production of Old Masters.

Finding Common Ground

Joseph Hogan of the Hauenstein Center  interviews me over two days for his fascinating and ecumenical podcast, Common Ground. 

In today's episode, we hear from James Panero, executive editor of The New Criterion, about contemporary museum culture and art in the age of Trump.

This is the second installment of our two-part interview with James Panero, executive editor of the New Criterion. In this episode, we hear a bit more about the history of the journal, how it fit into the culture wars of the 80s and 90s, and what critics and editors like Victor Navasky of the Nation and Jed Perl of the New Republic have thought about it.