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

The Artist’s Confessor: Morrissey, Melancholy, and the Romantic Imagination

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Abstract
I would like to explore the deep and often ineffable connection between the music of Morrissey—both in his solo career and as the lyricist of The Smiths—and those who identify as artists. By examining lyrical themes, tonal aesthetics, and cultural positioning, I would argue that Morrissey’s work appeals uniquely to creative individuals due to its intense interiority, emotional chiaroscuro, and its dramatization of alienation as an almost sacred state. More than just a songwriter, Morrissey functions as a mirror for the Romantic spirit in exile—a confessor for the beautifully bruised soul of the artist.

Introduction: The Saint of Sensitivity

In the lexicon of pop music, few figures possess the polarizing magnetism of Morrissey. To the general public, he may appear enigmatic, sometimes provocative, often aloof. But to artists—painters, poets, writers, actors, filmmakers—Morrissey is a familiar ghost, a nocturne rendered human. His lyrics read not so much as songs but as whispered diaries from a bedroom where imagination has become both altar and prison.

While academic studies on Morrissey have explored his cultural politics, sexual ambiguity, and postmodern ironies, less has been written on his peculiar and persistent appeal to artists. This article proposes that the affinity stems from Morrissey’s ability to convert inner turbulence into lyrical beauty, a trait that has long been the province of the artist.

The Aesthetic of the Wound

Morrissey’s music dwells in that exquisite space between despair and ecstasy. The Smiths’ catalog—songs like "I Know It’s Over," "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," and "Cemetry Gates"—reveals a sensibility acutely aware of death, desire, and dislocation. For artists, this lyrical world mirrors their own internal weather.

Art has historically been a response to fracture, and Morrissey does not attempt to "heal" so much as to honor the fracture. His lyrics romanticize pain, but not in the adolescent sense; rather, he renders melancholy not as an affliction but as a credential. "I wear black on the outside," he sings, "because black is how I feel on the inside." For the artist, this is not costume—it is creed.

The Literary Soul in Pop Clothing

There is a literary density to Morrissey’s lyrics that sets him apart from the pop landscape of his time. Echoes of Wilde, Auden, and Larkin haunt his verses, not as references but as kin. His songs function as lyrical essays—short meditations on class, loneliness, beauty, and shame.

In "Now My Heart is Full," he chants the names of obscure literary rebels—Dallow, Spicer, Pinkie, Cubitt—characters from Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. For the uninitiated, the line may pass unnoticed. For the artist steeped in literature, it lands like a secret handshake. Morrissey speaks in the dialect of cultural outsiders, making the listener feel less alone in their strange tastes and aesthetic obsessions.

Romanticism Reborn: The Sacredness of Isolation

Artists are often drawn to the margins—to silence, solitude, and sublimated longing. Morrissey, too, worships at the altar of the outsider. He sings not of triumphant love but of its absence; not of belonging but of the tender ache of exclusion. The world, in his work, is not hostile—but indifferent, and therefore all the more tragic.

But this isolation is never merely depressive—it is sacralized. To be lonely in a Morrissey song is to be initiated into a higher order of feeling. His characters are not victims; they are pilgrims. For the artist, who often struggles to articulate their inner dissonance in a noisy world, Morrissey becomes a kind of priest: unjudging, poetic, and precise.

Conclusion: The Unspoken Muse

In the end, Morrissey’s genius lies in his ability to articulate what others cannot—or dare not. He does not instruct, uplift, or entertain in the conventional sense. Instead, he gives voice to the pained dignity of those who feel too much, think too deeply, and belong nowhere.

To artists, he is not merely a musician. He is a companion. A confessor. A reminder that sadness, when shaped into language, becomes a kind of grace. For those who create not to escape the world but to make sense of its strangeness, Morrissey’s music offers not just comfort but communion.

~John Kobeck

The Drumbeat of Death

The drumbeat of death
pounds without mercy.

She stands betwixt East and West—
a tempest born of the North.

Where have you gone?
Opioid to the heart-wrung.

A gown lies wrought upon the bed,
high heels scattered on the floor.
The girl sits silent at the edge—
and naught remains.

Some perish behind hospital walls.
Most wither
behind the walls of their own souls.

She said, “You’re not my kind—
don’t take it personally.”

The executioner’s smile
is ever just beyond reach.
Then the jester weeps.

Life is a thread
of fleeting encounters,
each fading
into the ever-hungering void.

Haiku #642

The talking box screams with declaration

Woven into the sublime it’s well planned

Even the fool reads the walls in public toilets