But he admits that his family has been in service to Manhattan society for decades now; it may just be a question of what services society requires today.
Today, it seems, it is necessary to be a DJ, painter, T-shirt designer, record producer, film producer and gallerist. At any rate, that is what Izzy Gold, now mostly a DJ and T-shirt designer, wants for himself.
“I had the ultimate dream a couple of years ago of doing a multifaceted company that encompasses art, film, music, fashion and entertainment,” said Mr. Gold.
“Who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll open up a restaurant,” Mr. Gold said. “It’s an interesting parallel, but it makes sense in that we’re providing a service for those people.
IZZY GOLD IS a sweet guy. He has perfectly shaggy brown hair: greasy but not too greasy, a little tousled, just enough of it in his face to require frequent and casual brushing-away to the side. His five-day shadow is just a bit more than what a stylist might call for in a male model; just possibly not precision-engineered. And he is shorter and plushier than he looks in the many party photos of him on socialite-photographer Patrick McMullan’s Web site. His Blackberry goes off a lot with in
coming e-mails, although often it’s just junk mail or Verizon phone bills. He actually smokes those Marlboro Reds he rolls up into his skull-T-shirt sleeves while DJ-ing at GoldBar.
The T-shirt line is an outgrowth of the paintings Mr. Gold has been doing since high school. It started at the Browning School, when he began making the kind of art his parents friends’ would likely have admired; he still makes these kinds of paintings when he can.
“I would say Warhol and Basquiat are my influences,” he said.
But he is also a little bit like the kid that goes home after seeing Superman and draws the red-caped hero all over his schoolbooks, his guitar case, his Chuck Taylors. The childlike quality is only underscored by his tendency to refer to his paintings as “artwork.” Then again, all this might make him more like Warhol or Basquiat than many might care to admit.
In general the formula is to superimpose an image, or “icon” as he calls it, of a character from his favorite movies, like Scarface or Taxi Driver; then there’s the paint.
Four months before Avedon died, Mr. Gold said, he was at his father’s restaurant, and Mr. Gold gave him a piece of art he’d done: a likeness of Audrey’s Hepburn’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, painted over newspaper à la Jasper Johns.
“He asked me if I wanted to go work at the studio, and he would show me how to do some things,” he said. “I feel silly that I never took him up on it then.”
He sold his first paintings to “private collectors” for up to $4,000 a piece at age 18. Mr. Civetta majored in film at New York University, but left four credits short of graduation. “For what I’m doing nobody asks me for a college degree, or like a diploma or anything,” he said.
The T-shirts Mr. Gold produces look a lot like his paintings and sell at boutiques like Caravan and Big Drop for $60 and more; socialite and All My Children actress Leven Rambin, a friend, has been wearing them. Friends like Ms. Hilfiger and Sean Lennon have contributed designs to the line.
One of his most popular images, the one that started as a painting but appears now on his business cards and one of his T-shirts, is an ode to Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver—the Mohawk and sunglasses version.
Martin Scorsese, he said, smiled at him when he saw him wearing the shirt at the recent premiere of Shine a Light.
Mr. Gold says that his t-shirt line was funded entirely with money he made from his DJ gig and from "selling artworks." For his newer projects that include a record label, he was fortunate enough to find investors.
The Izzy Gold record label is headed up by Chris Young, who has produced albums by Ashlee Simpson and the Raveonettes. And since Mr. Gold likes to include his friends in his mini-empire, Ms. Rambin and Liam McMullan—yes, that’s Patrick’s son—have signed on to produce records with him.
Brad Leinhardt, another one of Mr. Gold’s close friends, is a partner in the business.
“The difference between Gen Y and Gen X is that you used to have to have a talent to become famous,” he said while he mingled in the Saturday night GoldBar crowd. “But now you can just be famous if people can relate to you.”
“The ideal plan for Izzy Gold is to have everything under one roof, so we’re looking for a building that will have a storefront, a gallery and maybe also a club where I can DJ.”
