Fighting Monsters: AI, Art, and the Death of the Human Voice

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

In one sharp sentence, Nietzsche warns us of the moral peril in battling darkness: in fighting monsters, we may become monstrous ourselves. This quote, born of 19th-century philosophy, now pulses with eerie relevance in the 21st century — particularly in the world of contemporary art, where the latest “monster” is artificial intelligence.

AI, once a tool, is becoming the artist. It paints, it composes, it writes, and it does so at lightning speed. The same technology that was meant to assist creativity now threatens to replace it. And in our effort to embrace, regulate, or compete with this machine intelligence, many artists — institutions even — are beginning to mirror the very inhuman logic and aesthetics they claim to resist.

The Disappearing Artist

Art, in its purest form, is human friction made visible. It's the sweat, the struggle, the impulse behind the brushstroke or lyric. But increasingly, galleries and collectors are turning their attention to AI-generated works — images crafted without biography, emotion, or risk. These pieces are applauded for their technical brilliance, but they arrive stripped of humanity. There is no backstory, no flawed creator, no lived experience.

This shift reflects a growing cultural hunger for novelty over meaning. But what happens when the soul of art is traded for the spectacle of synthetic perfection?

Nietzsche's warning echoes here: by embracing AI as the new creative force, we risk making the art world a mirror of the machine — cold, calculated, efficient, but soulless.

The Aesthetic of the Algorithm

We are witnessing the rise of what might be called algorithmic taste. Images that succeed are those that "perform" well — optimized for clicks, engagement, and virality. This is not art that challenges or endures. It's art that pleases. AI understands this perfectly. It scrapes billions of data points and serves up precisely what the crowd wants. It is the ultimate populist — and the ultimate panderer.

Meanwhile, the contemporary artist, caught in this digital tide, often finds themselves mimicking machine aesthetics to stay relevant. Glitch art, AI collaborations, neural-filtered portraits — these aren't just trends, they’re symptoms. In fighting to be seen in an algorithmic age, artists are becoming what the algorithm wants them to be.

Again: Nietzsche's monster.

Are Katy Perry and Taylor Swift Already AI?

In a sense, they are. Not in the literal, science-fiction sense — they are living, breathing women — but in their presentation and output, they often feel algorithmically assembled.

Every lyric, every beat drop, every visual is perfectly tuned to the market. These artists operate less like musicians and more like highly branded content machines. The songs feel processed. The personas feel manufactured. Even the “raw” or “confessional” moments often carry the sheen of calculated virality.

Taylor Swift’s every heartbreak is a product cycle. Katy Perry’s aesthetic reinventions echo updates, not evolution. It’s not that they aren’t talented — it’s that the system they inhabit has stripped away spontaneity. In short: they feel AI-generated because they’ve learned to perform for an algorithm.

When pop stars become predictable products, when their music feels like output from a marketing prompt — can we even call it art anymore? Or is it just content?

Nietzsche again: in fighting for fame in a world ruled by metrics, they’ve become the monster the system demanded — a reflection of the algorithm, flawless but hollow.

The Vanishing Avant-Garde

Historically, great art movements — Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art — arose in defiance. They were reactions to culture, politics, war, and technology. They had teeth. But where is the avant-garde today?

Ironically, it might lie in the analog. In the defiant return to slowness, to craftsmanship, to imperfection. The future avant-garde may be the artist who refuses AI. Who writes poetry by hand. Who paints without prompts. Who photographs using film. Who dares to be unfashionable.

Because if AI art is the new monster, then human imperfection may be our last rebellion.

Conclusion: Beware the Mirror

Nietzsche wasn’t warning us simply about monsters. He was warning us about mirrors — about how, in trying to defeat a threat, we can absorb its nature.

Artists and institutions must ask: are we creating, or are we mimicking the machine? Are we offering truth, or are we just optimizing? In this new battlefield of creativity, we should remember what made art valuable in the first place — the friction of flesh, the unpredictable mind, the human stain.

Otherwise, we’ll win the fight with the monster — but lose the soul of art in the process. ~John Kobeck

Welcome to the Age of Filters: Sterility, and the Death of Meaning in Contemporary Art

There was a time—not that long ago—when music had guts. It had soul. It had something to say. The 1990s may have been the last great decade for music. Oasis wasn’t just a band, it was a mood, a movement, a shot of testosterone in a world that still knew how to roar. I used to spend hours in the darkroom with nothing but chemicals, light, and the Gallagher brothers blaring through the speakers—defiant, loud, masculine. Music had an edge. It had meaning. It was art.

Now? Now we have Taylor Swift.

What happened?

We’re living through a period of cultural blandness—lower testosterone, soft edges, safe spaces, and safe sounds. Today artists are afraid to offend people. Today’s popular music—Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish—is slickly produced, sonically bland, and emotionally neutered. The lyrics are hollow, repetitive, and soulless. There’s no poetry, no message, no anger, no rebellion. Just Instagram captions set to music. Compare that to Bob Dylan, whose lyrics are poetry. Or Warhol’s Velvet Underground—gritty, experimental, dangerous.

This isn't about nostalgia. It’s about recognizing how the soul of a culture is reflected in its sound. Art and music have always walked hand in hand. You can’t talk about the visual avant-garde of the 60s without also hearing the hum of Dylan’s harmonica or the scream of a Lou Reed guitar riff in the background. You can't separate punk rock from the DIY zines and Xeroxed art of the late 70s and 80s. And you can’t talk about the swagger of the 90s without the Union Jack and a Britpop anthem.

Since then, both music and art have spiraled into an abyss of banality. By 2010, it felt like the final nails were hammered into the coffin. We’ve traded movements for moments, legacy for likes. We’re now in the TikTok era, where songs are written to trend in 15-second bursts. People go to concerts not to listen, but to record them on smart phones. We’ve replaced experience with selfies. Nobody watches with their eyes anymore. They watch through a screen they paid a thousand dollars to carry in their pockets.

I tried to get tickets to the Oasis reunion this summer—six hours in a Ticketmaster queue, gone in a blink. Sold out across North America. And why wouldn’t it be? Even after decades, people are still hungry for something real. Something with noise and nerve. That says a lot.

Culture is a mirror, and right now we don’t like what we see. We’re living in the age of filters, where authenticity is replaced by algorithms. Where books gather dust, and deep thinkers are outcasts. There are still talented artists out there—no doubt—but they’re islands in a vast, distracted sea. Today much of the focus in art are aesthetics and cliche. There is no movement, no direction, no Warhol or Pollock to lead the charge.

We are drifting.

Art, whether painting, sculpture, photography, or music, once shaped and defined its time. Now it struggles to matter. We are culturally illiterate, scrolling and swiping past meaning in favor of dopamine.

And still, somewhere in the background, Oasis plays.

~ John Kobeck 2025

My Crimson Companion

In the dimmest light of my dismal room,
She waits in silence, dressed in maroon.
No lover has lingered with such grace,
No friend has worn a kinder face.

The world forgets, the calls don’t come,
My voice is hoarse, my hands are numb.
But she—oh she—is always near,
Whispering truths I ache to hear.

She never mocks, she never lies,
Just stares at me with burgundy eyes.
When nights collapse and hope is thin,
She pours her heart and lets me in.

So toast to love that will not stray,
That dulls the blade and fades the grey—
A faithful girl in a glassy gown,
The only one who won’t let me down.

The Post-Postmodern Void: The Current State of the Art World and the Absence of Avant-Garde Vision

In the early to mid-20th century, the art world experienced convulsive, generative upheaval: the avant-garde exploded boundaries, movements emerged in succession—Cubism, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Conceptualism—and with them, artists who defined not just eras but philosophical worldviews. Picasso restructured reality. Pollock redefined gesture. Warhol obliterated the divide between high and low culture. These were not simply stylistic shifts—they were ideological ruptures that signaled new ways of seeing, thinking, and being.

Today, however, the landscape of contemporary art feels inert by comparison—technically proficient, highly professionalized, yet hollow. We are living, it seems, in what might best be described as a Post-Postmodern Void: a cultural moment defined not by its convictions but by its absence of them. There is no avant-garde today. There is no prevailing aesthetic philosophy. There is no dominant movement. Instead, there is a surplus of production and a deficit of direction.

The Repetition of the Already-Digested

The prevailing condition of the art world is one of repetition—what philosopher Jean Baudrillard might have called the recycling of simulacra. Painters paint the same paintings. Photographers replicate the formal tropes of their mentors. Digital artists endlessly remix visual languages that were once subversive but are now institutionalized. There is little rupture, little risk. Even work that aspires to provocation feels pre-approved by the very systems it claims to critique.

Innovation has flattened into a professional strategy. Graduate programs teach how to make work that looks like "contemporary art"—a vague aesthetic formed by consensus and maintained by the economy of the art market. There is no manifesto because there is no rebellion. Instead, we have tastefully ambiguous wall text, conceptual hedging, and a strong preference for irony over ideology.

The Market as Muse

It would be disingenuous to ignore the role of the market in this vacuum. The global art market thrives—not on revolution, but on commodification. Aesthetic novelty has been replaced by financial viability. Art fairs, biennials, and blue-chip galleries function less as platforms for ideas and more as extensions of luxury branding.

Even "disruptive" art often arrives fully commodified. Street art, digital art, and even AI art have been absorbed with startling speed into the commercial and institutional apparatuses they might once have challenged. The system neutralizes rebellion by monetizing it.

What Will This Era Be Remembered For?

When future art historians look back on the early 21st century, what will they see? Not a movement. Not a manifesto. Likely, they will see a glut of content. They will find massive digital archives, NFTs, photo books, and Instagram feeds—millions of images, few of which mark a discernible shift in visual culture. They will see a period obsessed with identity performance but reluctant to stake claims of universal aesthetic or philosophical consequence.

We will not be remembered for innovation, but for multiplicity without cohesion. This is not a renaissance. It is not even a dark age. It is a drift. A silence disguised as noise.

The Post-Postmodern Condition

The term “postmodern” once described a break from the grand narratives of modernism. But what do we call this moment that lacks even the critical ambition of postmodernism? What happens after irony, fragmentation, and deconstruction?

We might call it post-critical or aesthetic nihilism. Or perhaps, more accurately, it is a vacuum of voice—a moment when art has access to every medium, every archive, every influence, and yet rarely uses that access to say anything fundamentally new.

Conclusion: The Task Ahead

This critique is not a lament for the past or a call for nostalgic returns. It is a challenge to the present. The role of the artist has always been to name the age, to wrestle with its contradictions, and to propose new visions of what art—and life—can be.

To break the current stasis, we need new voices that are not afraid to risk failure. We need conviction. We need a return to stakes. Until then, we remain suspended in the post-postmodern void—surrounded by images, and yet yearning for meaning. ~ John Kobeck 2025

The Gaze in Fine Art Photography: Learning from the Old Maste

Top: Francisco Goya, Portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, c. 1798
Bottom: Contemporary photograph by the author, 2025

If you aspire to be a fine art photographer, go to museums. Study painting. Learn from the old masters. In particular, spend time with artists like Francisco Goya, who mastered the gaze—not just technically, but psychologically, emotionally, and politically.

I have an MFA in fine art photography, and one of the most formative shifts in my visual thinking came not through cameras or technique, but through learning to see. Truly seeing begins with looking—looking at how others have looked, at how they constructed their compositions, their emotional invitations, their confrontations. The gaze is not merely where the subject looks—it's what they communicate, or fail to. It is where the viewer meets the subject in a silent, electric exchange.

Take, for instance, Goya’s portrait of Jovellanos. The subject’s eyes meet ours—melancholic, contemplative, intelligent. His posture suggests internal reflection, but the gaze anchors the painting in intimacy. Goya's brilliance lies in how the sitter's intellect and social position are revealed not just through costume and props, but through this direct, thoughtful connection.

Compare this to my own photograph, a contemporary portrait made in natural light, with a plain background and casual denim shirt. The gaze is quiet, serious, and ambiguous. She looks at us, but also through us. Like Goya's subject, she seems caught in a moment of stillness and private thought. There's a kind of emotional parity—no theatrical gesture, only the eyes to tell the story.

The photograph is not meant to imitate Goya, but to be in dialogue with him. By placing the two images top and bottom, we invite viewers to reflect on how the gaze operates across media and centuries. This is not about nostalgia or homage—it's about continuity in visual communication. It’s about learning from painting to enrich the language of photography.

So again: if you're serious about becoming a fine art photographer, spend less time on tutorials and more time in museums. The old masters knew everything about light, narrative, form—and above all, about the gaze.

Francisco Goya, Portrait of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (c. 1798)

Contemporary photograph by John Kobeck