ARTS Darrow Montgomery
Art on Our Sleeves For decades, City Paper arts editors and Washington itself have shown their hearts through art. By Sarah Marloff @sarahmarloff What does it mean to take your job as an arts editor at a local paper too seriously? Well, it depends who you ask. And I’ve asked a lot of people—former editors from this very paper’s arts section to be exact. How else could I put 41 years, plus the future, into frame? “I wanted the section to have news—hard news reporting for the arts and I wanted the section to have really good critical writing,” says Jon Fischer, Washington City Paper’s arts editor from 2010 to 2012. “I wanted us to take it seriously.” Another former editor, Brad McKee, who ran the section from 1998 to 2000, described the act of critiquing art as “really writing about the meaning of life. This movie—or play—is just your excuse.” Another former editor said, chuckling: “Maybe [that’s] taking it too seriously.” Christina Cauterucci, the arts editor from 2014 to 2015 (and, full disclosure, a close friend of mine), was at the paper for a short time but says it “looms large” in her career. She, too, notes that City Paper, its arts section and as a whole, took itself more seriously “than anyone else ever would.” She continues, “We expected a lot of ourselves even when, perhaps, nobody else was expecting us to write as beautifully or critique things as thoroughly or do as much reporting as we did. We wanted to do it because we thought D.C. deserved it—the arts scene in D.C. deserved it. And we had so much fun doing it.” She’s right. Like Fischer, taking the job seriously is exactly what all of us have done since the paper first appeared in 1981. Coverage goals may have changed from editor to editor, but whether it was having the best written critiques, offering hard news reporting on the local art scene, covering the role of public art in D.C., or the impacts of gentrification, it has always been done with a commitment to excellence, integrity, and, most importantly, the readers and artists who call the city home. But it’s not about pleasing or placating anyone. “My worry was that we would be missing something that would be happening locally,” says Leonard Roberge, arts editor from 2000 to 2006. “I wasn’t necessarily worried about making the local arts people happy.” Glenn Dixon, arts editor from October 1995 to March 1998, puts it more bluntly: “Every cultural
Local rapper Fat Trel, 2012
product is always competing with another cultural product … I didn’t want my readers to feel misled the way I sometimes had.” Alt-weeklies are supposed to be tone setters and sources of discovery, as Mark Athitakis, arts editor from January 2007 to late 2008, sums up. And in true alt-weekly fashion, City Paper has documented the rise, fall, and rebirth of the city’s creators and art spaces as well as their fans and naysayers. “An alt-weekly can say what’s worth paying attention to that other places are missing,” says Athitakis, who worked at the Chicago Reader and
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SF Weekly before joining the WCP staff. Alona Wartofsky, who still freelances for City Paper today, agrees: “I always felt like part of the job was to fill in the gaps the Post didn’t cover.” Wartofsky joined the paper in 1981; during her 13 years on staff she held many roles, including arts editor. Over the course of City Paper’s history, we’ve chronicled artists who would blow up— GoldLink, Logic, Wale, Fugazi, and Fat Trel are some of the names that stood out to former editors—as well as more obscure local creators such as Mark Chorvinsky and Julian Mazor. “The things I remember most fondly about
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the art scene are the subjects of [arts] profiles,” Roberge recalls, sharing details of Mazor, an author who didn’t release a second book for 36 years following the debut of his successful shortstory collection. When we hang up, he texts me two more stories from his tenure: one about a couple who attended art openings for the food and a profile on Taka, a 22-year-old from Japan and superfan of D.C. punk. “It’s really these fantastic local characters that I value the most,” Roberge says. “Some of them will still be completely unknown.” For Kayla Randall, who edited the section
