We’ve said au revoir to objective truth, haven't seen anything absolute for years, could hardly spot a universal fact if it announced it was one on a T shirt.

Modernism died with the creeping realisation that no matter how many scientific and artistic advances occurred the world could not solve its fundamantal problems. Wars, hunger, illness, death all remain to haunt us, even if we can make TVs the size of radios and stock our supermarkets with strawberries all year round. We still can't guarantee a sunny day for our mother's wedding. We can't keep on being proud that there are a few human footprints on the moon.

Along with the ideas of supremacy and world-control the canvas so beloved of modernist art has been thrown away. If life is ambivalent, nihilistic and relative, then art must be also. To be true to post-modern life art must be disposable, cheap, accessible and relevant. The time of the million pound sculpture, the thirty million dollar painting has been and gone. Nothing rules, art must reflect that.<P>
So we suffer an honest emptiness, a despair bequeathed by centuries of failure. Our fear of meaninglessness is absorbed and either appears in despair or in a smiling desire to live for surface, to revel in trash, to take individuality to new levels, for ultimately you have only yourself, you create what you want to be, you are nothing and you are suddenly everything.

Does anyone believe anymore that art can make a difference in an art gallery? A place where it will be viewed by three of your mates and two art students who have to write a thesis on Why contemporary art is rubbish? Postmodern art has left the gallery behind. And where better to find it again than the T shirt?

We can’t commit to a £10,000 painting because we know that commitment cannot exist and is purely a self-constraint to attempt to define ourselves within this worldly sujective reality. Not to mention the need for £10,000. High art is unsold, and trash art becomes the new high art. You don’t want to buy an oil painting that you’ll be lumbered with all your life, but a twenty quid T shirt that speaks about now, that you can bin when you’re sick of it?
It's the new high art. A T shirt’s very disposability is its joy. The commitment - if not non-existent - is at a level that the po-mo generation can cope with. No one’s asking you to nail it to a wall and look at it every day and think yeh, lovely use of crimzon alarizin. You wear it, put your current ideas in the public domain and move on.

No one believes in future progress. Existence exists purely in the moment. We’re trapped in our own sub cultures, trying to escape. Yet the T shirt stretches across all subcultures. The T shirt is the ultimate item of clothing. Worn by everyone, cheap, disposable, collectible, fashionable, it can be anything to anyone - and that is what makes it the ultimate post-modern classic.

© 2004 conceptTshirts