Total, glossy complicity
New York, 2010. Four editors — Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, David Toro — launch an online magazine with fashion-shoot production values and an editorial line of total, glossy complicity. Nothing about it announces itself as art. That is the announcement. Where every earlier vanguard attacked commerce from outside — the manifesto, the refusal, the squat — DIS walks in through the front of the shop and starts merchandising.
The lookbook, the trend piece, the branded lifestyle spread: each format occupied exactly, executed to a standard the formats themselves rarely reached, with an irony calibrated so finely it cannot be told from affirmation. The joke is undecidable by design. Brands hired it; critics theorised it; both were right, which was the point.
The collection
There is no outside left to critique from. The honest position is total, legible complicity — occupy commerce's formats so exactly that the occupation doubles as documentation.
The organs of the brand
The magazine grew organs. DISimages: a functioning parody stock agency, its images genuinely licensable — the stock photograph, that anonymous wallpaper of commerce, recut as the period's true portrait genre. DISown: a pop-up retail line of artists' merchandise, the shop floor occupied as exhibition space. Lookbooks, lifestyle content, campaigns for nothing, all shot to the house gloss — fashion-shoot production values applied to everything.
Four founders operated as an editorial politburo, commissioning outward into a wide orbit of artists, writers and designers; New York's post-internet cohort fed the channel images and essays. The magazine was the scene's room, and its house style was the artwork.
Why it circulated
A brand · verified buyer
Commerce's own gloss was the fastest route into its bloodstream — work that looked like advertising circulated wherever advertising did. We hired the parody.
A critic · verified buyer
The undecidable joke recruited both sides. I theorised it; my colleague denounced it; the issue circulated either way.
The platform · verified buyer
The age rewarded a magazine behaving like a brand and a brand behaving like an artwork. Engagement excellent. Would amplify again.
In stock / sold out
In stock — what held the brand together
- four editors running one channel under one name
- the house gloss — fashion-shoot production values applied to everything
- New York's post-internet cohort feeding the magazine images and essays
Sold out — what wore it through
- the biennale backlash — The Present in Drag read as the style's exhaustion
- irony's diminishing returns as the platforms out-ironised the artists
- the pivot to streaming, dissolving the collective into a content channel
The editors
From net.art to the biennale
The bloodline runs from net.art's institutional mischief, carried into the platform age, and cross-pollinates with K-HOLE's trend-report poetics — the deadpan corporate document as prophecy. What DIS bound together no gallery could have: a cohort dispersed across studios and time zones, convened by one channel and one gloss.
The ascent was vertiginous. Within six years of launch the four were curating the 9th Berlin Biennale — The Present in Drag, 2016 — the summit of the post-internet style and, for its hostile critics, the moment of its exhaustion. The backlash had been sharpening since 2014; the biennale gave it a monument to sharpen against. Meanwhile the platforms themselves were learning the trick, out-ironising the artists at industrial scale.
The magazine as trojan horse — a scene organised around a channel whose editorial gloss was itself the artwork.
Defined the visual language of post-internet art, carried it to the 9th Berlin Biennale, and named the condition — gloss, complicity, the brandified self — that a decade of art and criticism then argued with.
10 / Notice of relocation — the fate
This store has moved.
dis magazine → dis.art · publishing traded for streaming, 2018
Read one way, a store closing. Read the other, the logic completing itself: an identity that lived in the channel rather than the members could dissolve into that channel without dying. The name persists as dis.art; the aesthetic has long since been metabolised by the advertising and platforms it mirrored — which is either defeat, or the fullest possible distribution.