How to Help the Mentally Ill

"Homeless and cold" by Ed Yourdon, taken January 25, 2010 in Verdi Square, 72nd Street and Broadway, New York

CITY JOURNAL
July 21, 2014

How to help the Mentally Ill?
by James Panero

A New York City task force could repeat the mistakes of deinstitutionalization.

Early last February, Jerome Murdough, homeless and seeking shelter from freezing temperatures, was arrested for trespassing in the stairwell of an East Harlem housing project. Unable to post his $2,500 bail, the 56-year-old Marine veteran with a history of mental illness remained in police custody. A week later, on the evening of February 14, he was transferred to a solitary cell in the mental-observation unit of New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex. Guards were supposed to check on Murdough every 15 minutes, but he was not fully observed until early the next morning, when it became apparent that a malfunction in the prison’s climate-control system had heated his 6-by-10-foot cinder-block room into the triple digits. When discovered slumped over his bed, Murdough’s lifeless body registered a core temperature of more than 100 degrees.Headlines blared that Murdough had been “Baked to Death on Rikers Island.”

Murdough’s gruesome death prompted New York City mayor Bill de Blasio to announce his first major law-enforcement initiative, the Task Force on Behavioral Health and the Criminal Justice System. Set to issue findings this September, it will seek recommendations from city police, judges, district attorneys, and mental-health workers on “innovative strategies to transform, reform and update this city’s criminal justice system.” In a statement, de Blasio said that the task force will allow the city to “provide real, lasting mental health and addiction treatment” for the city’s mentally ill. “For far too long,” he continued, “our city’s jails have acted as de facto mental health facilities.”

The mayor is right that the criminal-justice system dedicates inordinate resources to policing mental illness, often with disgraceful results. In this regard, New York’s experience mirrors that of much of the country. A 2010study by the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) found that there were “three times more seriously mentally ill persons in jails and prisons than in hospitals.” Sheriffs’ associations estimate that the mentally ill make up over a quarter of inmates in their jails. According to E. Fuller Torrey, the founder of TAC, the Los Angeles County Jail has become the largest de facto inpatient psychiatric facility in the United States. Rikers Island is the second-largest.

It shouldn’t require a task force to understand why. The vast incarceration of the mentally ill is a consequence of the 50-year-old policy of deinstitutionalization—the closing of state mental asylums and the reduction of hospital beds set aside for the mentally ill. Lacking both the medical resources and legal framework to care properly for the severely mentally ill, the community-based system meant to replace it was never equipped to give true “asylum” to those patients unable to cope in regular society. As a result, those most in need of help often wind up revolving among outpatient facilities, homeless shelters, and the streets. Arrest and prosecution offered the only remaining method of sequestering the violent and delusional and preventing them from harming themselves and others.

Unfortunately, early indications suggest that the city’s new task force could actually make things worse. Just as government planning failed to account for the catastrophe of deinstitutionalization, a new decriminalization initiative could lead to the mentally ill being pushed back into the subway system and the open-air asylums of Broadway and Central Park. This would represent a shameful return to the status quo of the early 1990s, before quality-of-life policing began under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Each year, the NYPD receives 100,000 calls concerning “emotionally disturbed persons.” Elizabeth Glazer, the mayor’s criminal-justice coordinator and a leader of the task force, asks, “If someone picks up the phone and calls 911 because they see someone acting out on the street, then what does the police officer do?” Of all possible answers to this question, “leave them on the streets” seems to be the worst. Yet civil libertarians may use the task force cops to do just that, undermining proactive policing and the right of New Yorkers to live without the terror of unstable people undergoing psychotic breakdowns in public.

Instead, the task force should strengthen the state’s ability to compel the mentally ill to pursue proper treatment—for instance, by widening the use of Kendra’s Law, named after Kendra Webdale. In 1999, Andrew Goldstein, a schizophrenic who had stopped taking his medications, pushed Webdale to her death beneath a subway train. Kendra’s Law, which the ACLU opposed, gave New York courts the power to compel the mentally ill to accept treatment as a condition of living in society. According to D.J. Jaffe of Mental Illness Policy Org., Kendra’s Law reduces incarceration by 87 percent. By applying it to all prison inmates upon their release, the law would reduce reincarceration as well.

Another constructive measure would be to improve the mental-health services offered within the prison system, while revisiting the idea of asylums. Since prisons have become makeshift mental institutions, such an effort would have immediate results. But incarceration will always be an inefficient and inhumane method of caring for the mentally ill compared with purpose-built institutions. “The simple claims of a common humanity,” wrote Thomas Story Kirkbride, the progressive architect of the nineteenth-century asylums, “should induce every State to make a liberal provision for all its insane, and it will be found that it is no less its interest to do so, as a mere matter of economy.” Until New York comes to terms with the failure of deinstitutionalization, the criminalization of mental illness will never be cured.

Backstage Breakdown

CITY JOURNAL
July 6, 2014

Backstage Breakdown
by James Panero

The Met’s labor impasse penalizes opera lovers and supporters.

Labor troubles in the performing arts have often reached operatic proportions. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt stepped into the middle of a dispute over foreign musicians at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and he wasn’t the last head of state to intervene in a backstage conflagration. The loss of a performance season due to a strike or lockout is rightly regarded as damaging and even deadly to an arts house, posing a threat to the culture of art itself.

Considering the intensity of the discord surrounding ongoing negotiations at the Met, it would take more than a president to solve this year’s crisis at the 131-year-old opera house (its other crisis, if you consider the eruptionover its decision to stage The Death of Klinghoffer). With contracts for 15 of the Met’s 16 different unions set to expire on July 31, the rancorous talks now underway between management and labor could result in a lockout of part, if not all, of the upcoming season.

Who is at fault? On one side is Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. In an era of escalating expenses and dwindling ticket sales, Gelb says he is justified in seeking 16 percent cuts in pay and benefits from labor in an attempt to rebalance the books. But Gelb has spent lavishly: during his tenure, which began in 2006, the Met’s annual operating budget has increased from $222 million to $327 million. Gelb has paid for some of this increase through drawdowns on the Met’s endowment, which now contains less than a year’s worth of reserve funding.

Alan S. Gordon, the executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists and the representative for the Met’s unionized chorus singers, has been Gelb’s most vocal opponent, accusing the Met manager of waging “nothing short of economic warfare.” Gelb, he wrote in one of many publicly circulated emails, “has, in essence, declared war on [the Met’s] performing artists, instrumentalists, stagehands and on the unions representing them and on all of the Met’s other represented employees, in an effort to deflect focus from the waste, excess, extravagance and out-of-control spending that has been the hallmark of Gelb’s administration.”

While each side in the imbroglio lambasts the other as unrealistic, both the Met’s management and its unions are out of touch with today’s realities. On June 16, the Met released its latest tax filings. Gelb earned $1.8 million in pay and benefits in 2012. Granted, Gelb has since taken a modest pay cut, and his 2012 salary represented some one-time payouts. Yet a salary in excess of $1 million a year underscores the unreality of Gelb’s leadership. And Gordon claims that Gelb plans to keep his full-time Met chauffeur.

Even Gelb’s purported success, the much-touted “Live in HD” broadcasts beamed to a couple thousand movie theaters, has not covered the budget shortfall. Meanwhile the HD initiative has further eroded the primacy of the Met’s live audience and eaten into its main donor base, with everyone from singers to seamstresses now forced to play to the cameras rather than the live ticketgoers. Gelb earned his reputation through music television, arranging the broadcasts of Vladimir Horowitz’s 1986 return concerts in the USSR. Yet at a time when even our phones can record in HD, his vision of lavish live broadcasts has quickly dated. For greater accessibility, today the Met could simply post a handful of full-length recordings free to YouTube every year, with opera by iPad serving as an invitation to rather than a replacement for the live event.

But similar profligacy reigns on the union side. The Met’s tax filings reveal that three of the house’s five top-paid employees are members of Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees—stagehands whocommand pay and benefits in excess of $450,000 a year. Even Gordon’s beloved choristers, the 80 or so full-time employees who perform many nights behind the headline stars, take home an estimated $300,000 in annual pay and benefits. These are hardly proletarian sums, and the numbers are hard to justify to a millennial generation still suffering the job-market fallout of the financial crisis.

To move forward, both sides need to stop comparing their pay packages and begin proving their worth to a new opera public. Met management should pursue greater transparency in its nonprofit filings; the public deserves to see a line-by-line itemization of expenses for each new production and each star singer, as well as an explanation of where the money will come from to pay for it all. At the same time, the unions should explain why their meters click for everything from rehearsal time to costume changes, and open the door for workers of similar talents willing to do some jobs for less.

In the last few years, major arts organizations such as the New York City Opera have gone bankrupt; others, like the San Diego Opera, have verged on the brink of insolvency, and labor walkouts have silenced performances from Minnesota to Carnegie Hall. In most of these cases, management and labor have both been part of the problem. The losers are opera lovers and a future generation of supporters, increasingly treated with contempt. Joseph Volpe, Gelb’s predecessor and a seasoned negotiator whom management has kept out of current talks, pointed this out years ago, during an earlier round of strife at the opera house. “The most serious side effect” of a breakdown backstage is the crucial financial support of rank-and-file donors, Volpe wrote in his 2006 memoir, The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera. “[They were] turned off by all the bloodletting,” he added. “Opera is habit forming, but once the habit is broken, it’s easily kicked.”

Gallery Chronicle (May)

Centerpiece at the Hispanic Society of America: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Duchess of Alba, 1797; Oil on Canvas, 210.2 x 149.2 cm

THE NEW CRITERION
May 2014

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On the Hispanic Society of America and “William Powhida: Overculture,” at Postmasters, New York.

There is something antediluvian about the story of Theodore S. Beardsley Jr., the director of the Hispanic Society of America from 1965 to 1995. What? Never heard of Beardsley’s trove of Spanish art, artifacts, and literature sequestered in an alcazar in Washington Heights? Good, went his reply, and why should you. “We’ve been here since 1904 and one of the things we’ve learned to do is lie low,” Beardsley said to Grace Glueck ofThe New York Times in 1989, “I’ve sat on a lot of boards, and bigness is always worse.”

Founded in 1904, opened in 1908, the Hispanic Society was the first of several institutions to anchor the beaux-arts campus of Audubon Terrace, the great and distinctly American cultural vision of the philanthropist Archer M. Huntington located on 155th Street and Broadway. (I wrote about the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Terrace’s other remaining institution, in last month’s column.) Motivated by a love for Spanish storytelling, Huntington created a jewel-box that was as fanciful as the tales he read, filling it with books, art, and artifacts from Iberian history. He bought masterworks by El Greco, Goya, José de Ribera, Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán along with 800 other paintings, 6,000 watercolors and drawings, 1,000 sculptures, 6,000 decorative objects, 15,000 prints, and 175,000 documentary photographs of Spanish life. Much of this he stuffed into the Society’s main court hall. He ringed a tight second-floor balcony with his most significant paintings, which are still not shown in ideal light. Goya’s Duchess of Alba (1797) greets visitors upon arrival with an hauteur that recalls the work of John Singer Sargent (whose studies from the Prado are included here as well). He also gathered a significant collection of over 250,000 books and manuscripts on the Iberian Peninsula—20,000 printed before 1701, including rare hand-drawn maps of Spanish exploration (a singular example is kept behind a curtain in the Society library) and a first edition of Don Quixote.

The Society’s art, architecture, and sculptural program spoke to the high-minded wonder of Huntington’s vision. Charles P. Huntington, Archer’s cousin, drew up the master plans for the beaux-arts campus and designed the buildings of the Hispanic Society itself (Cass Gilbert and William M. Kendall of McKim, Mead & White were other architects for the site). In the 1920s, the celebrated sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, Archer’s wife, designed a grand outdoor program, after the site’s orientation was turned east to Broadway, for what was at first a staircase leading up from 166th Street. Here her bronze equestrian statue of El Cid, the medieval Castilian knight, rides beside a monumental relief of Don Quixote. Huntington also commissioned the painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida to create a fourteen-painting cycle of “Visions of Spain,” recording regional scenes of Spanish life, which he installed in their own hall in the Society.

Audubon Terrace with The Hispanic Society of America at center.

Yet Glueck’s article, “Major Hispanic Museum Lies Low and Likes It,” was as much about exposing Huntington’s successor’s unreconstructed attitudes towards museum governance as drawing attention to the treasured collection in his trust. Blessed with Huntington’s endowment income and tasked with strict rules about how the institution should be run, Beardsley showed little interest in serving anything more than the founder’s wishes. When it came to donor intent, he was an unreconstructed originalist. There was the issue of loans, for instance. Huntington never wanted his masterworks to leave the building, nor that outside works be shown among the collection, and Beardsley agreed. ‘’We love them,” he said of such restrictions. ‘’You put pieces in jeopardy by moving them around. The whole loan thing is a mixed bag.’’ There was also the library, where Beardsley strictly limited the hours and forbade patrons from making copies. “A lot of our consultation is by mail and telephone,” he explained to Glueck. “We’re much more famous in Madrid than we are here.”

And then there was his approach to fundraising. “We have never blatantly courted donors,” he admitted. “We find it tacky. Mr. Huntington felt it was not very gentlemanly, and until he died if we needed money, he wrote a check.’’ Beardsley refused to publish the names of his board. Even as his endowment dwindled, his curatorial staff shrank in number, and his building was in need of repairs, he had little desire for an infusion of funds. “Our maintenance is slow, but if someone gave me a check for $10 million, I wouldn’t do it faster,” he concluded, “there’s a danger in having too many workmen in the building.”

Given Beardsley’s antiquated ideas, it’s remarkable he lasted as long as he did. Five years after Glueck’s article, reality caught up with him. It was merely chance that, largely after World War II, a Hispanic population settled in the neighborhood around the Hispanic Society. For Beardsley, the only time “town and gown” came together was when they came for him. In 1993, Robin Cembalest published an interview with Beardsley in Art News in which he stated that he didn’t reach out to his local community because they had a “low level of culture.” In the same piece, George S. Moore, a retired chairman of Citibank and the Society’s octogenarian president, blasted the neighborhood as “nontaxpaying slums.” When word of this interview got out, according to Cembalest, protesters gathered to chase the director as he crossed the Terrace courtyard, chanting “Beardsley,racista!” A year later, it was over for Beardsley, and Mitchell Codding, the Society’s current director, was installed.

The main court hall of the Hispanic Society of America. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

It’s easy to mock a figure like Beardsley. Across the cultural world, his notions of museum stewardship, curmudgeonly and narrow, have now been eclipsed by nearly the direct opposite. Today our model of cultural governance looks to reinterpret a founder’s wishes, encapsulate original buildings in new construction, maximize turnstile numbers and revenue, and make fundraising the metric of institutional success, all the while lavishing the administration with six- and seven-figure salaries. Yet with so many institutions, from the New York Public Library to the Museum of Modern Art, now pursuing this destructive extreme, it must be said that the crustiness of Beardsley’s tenure left us an institution that was unspoiled. For now, we can continue to enjoy a free institution as its founder intended while appreciating an artifact of American museology that is nearly untouched.

For an institution as anachronistic as the Hispanic Society, rich in art and artifacts but out of line with contemporary museum standards, the future is never certain. For a time after his arrival, Codding announced his intentions to relocate the Society further downtown. It would have been a move that mirrored the departure of several other of the Terrace’s original inhabitants. In the 1970s the American Geographical Society left for Wisconsin. In the 1990s the Museum of the American Indian went to Washington. In 2008 the American Numismatic Society relocated to downtown Manhattan. For the Hispanic Society, picking up stakes was a predictable idea, but it would have been a disastrous one, curing the institution by killing it. Fortunately, these plans never materialized, and now, it appears, Codding has doubled down on his current location, acquiring an annex from the former American Indian museum and repairing his infrastructure (although he has come under fire for auctioning off a multi-million-dollar coin collection).

The Hispanic Society of America, with original entrance gate facing 166th Street.

Today’s museum directors have a habit of mistaking solutions for problems. The remote setting and idiosyncrasies of the Hispanic Society are not what drive people away. They make the place a wondrous attraction. The challenge is to find a golden path of leadership that understands and nurtures the soul of an institution, rather than carving it out and replacing it. While at the helm of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello understood this course better than anyone, and fortunately he has now been serving as an advisor to the Hispanic Society. One of his suggestions, a good one, has been to add the words “museum” and “library” to the Society’s name. Such modest and smart proposals are just what the Society needs to continue broadening its outreach without becoming a community center, a shopping mall, or a blockbusterKunsthalle—and the Society can still do more. Its outward appearance is weedy and uninviting. Whoever heads up its social-media outreach is doing yeoman’s work, but an overhauled website would be nice too. The courtyard is in need of a facelift, and the entryways could use better signage. Frankly, even while walking within Audubon Terrace, I passed by the Society for years without realizing there was a remarkable and free museum just inside those doors. A broader advertising and media campaign would go a long way—along, of course, with a grant for it. So too would further outreach to the local community, which Codding has already initiated (although as an outsider I would welcome a guide to the area’s Hispanic restaurants, such as the delicious and affordable Margot). And why doesn’t the MTA do more to spread the word of this unsung venue, which, after all, is only a subway ride away?

As the dynamics of New York culture are being driven out from the center to the peripheries of the city, 155th Street and Broadway offers a welcome reprieve from the big-money bustle of our more establishment institutions. The adopted son of a railroad baron, Archer M. Huntington assumed that high culture would follow the new subway lines uptown. It may have taken a century longer than he expected, but Audubon Terrace may suddenly find itself in the right place at the right time.

William Powhida, "Overculture," exhibition installation view

One of my most anticipated exhibitions last month, and certainly related to the discussion above, was “Overculture” by William Powhida at Postmasters.1 Powhida mixes information-rich diagrams (also called “Informationism”) with institutional critique. He is famous for his cranky public persona, which he widely broadcasts through Twitter. For a younger man, he has cultivated a surprisingly high level of dyspepsia and bile. Yet his work succeeds for two very obvious reasons: the humorous intelligence of his criticism and the craft of his draftsmanship. Both aspects were on display at Postmasters. They were even knowingly divided into two distinct sections. On one side, there were the hand-drawn lists of art-world quibbles for which he is best known. Some were drafted to look like they were scribbled on enormous lined spiral paper, such as How To Try To BeOK With The Contemporary Art Market and How To Make An Auction Ready-Made (both 2014). Others riffed on classic diagrams of art history. The best example took the branching tree motif from Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look at Modern Art in America from 1946 and turned it into How to Look @ The Contemporary Art-Industrial Complex in America. In Powhida’s take, name-brand artists are the big leaves growing from the trunk of “Auctions and Big Box Franchises,” while a smaller branch of emerging and mid-level artists has been eaten away by a beaver labeled “rent,” and the smallest branch for “non-profit artist run alternatives” has been shot through and bandaged up while waving a white flag labeled “culture war.”

William Powhida, How To Look @ The Contemporary Art-Industrial Complex In America, 2014; graphite on paper, 31 x 23 inches 

The other half of Powhida’s exhibition sublimated his criticism in his craft. The painted spiral-bound sheets went abstract and blank, or they were turned into sculptures of metal that resembled God-sized crumpled notebook pages, created with remarkable verisimilitude. A final work at first looked like nothing but screws in the wall and leveling lines, as though a piece had been removed. But a closer inspection revealed it to be trompe l’oeil, drawn directly on gallery drywall. Had Powhida sold, or had he sold out?

The self-awareness of this show and its high level of skill left me with a sense for Powhida that was ultimately more profound and somber than comic. The nature of his criticism reminded me that our cultural problems are far more endemic than we like to admit. A critic of the left, he would find common ground in much of what appears in these pages. The fact is, our cultural establishment is now unswayed by criticisms shared across the political spectrum. Which leaves the rest of us tilting at windmills.

1 “William Powhida: Overculture” was on view at Postmasters, New York, from March 15 through April 19, 2014.