Painter Anthony Izzo never cared much for the traditional art-market system, where the gallery owner is God, the artist is powerless, and the art is presented in arid little white-wine-and-attitude openings. That system is all about exclusivity, while Izzo’s impulses, rising from the meat grinder of a southwest-side Catholic gay boyhood, are definitely in the opposite direction.
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“Even as an artist, when I used to go in those galleries I’d feel so uncomfortable,” Izzo says. “You drop your slides off, they contact you maybe a couple weeks later to say ‘we want you’–or not–tell you what to bring, and that’s about it.” In most cases, there’s no relationship between curator and artist or artist and buyer, and the artist has very little control over what works are shown. The public perceives an enormous snub–the sense that to go to a gallery, “you need to be educated, you need to have money.” To a guy who spent most of his sexually ambiguous, Coke-bottle-glasses-and-checkered-pants youth as the class punching bag, the prevailing ethos didn’t sit well.
“The goal was to have three or four of these one-day art events a year that would draw masses of people,” Izzo says. “I would rent a 10,000-square-foot space. A week before the show we would go to the hardware store, spend hundreds of dollars, build walls, and the night the show was over, tear it all down.” Izzo and his business partner produced their own PR blitz, even going on WGN radio to talk it up to an audience more likely to head to a baseball game. The people came: the last Artikism, in September 1996, drew a thousand viewers and sold 80 works. But after doing it for a year and a half, the show had begun to change in ways that made Izzo uncomfortable. It was getting too commercial, he says, “so I ended it. I just approached [my partner] one day and says, ‘I had a pleasure working with you up to this point, but I can’t go on no more.’”
