They could follow the fashion scene, but unless you're completely vacuous, Posh aka Victoria Beckham for example, you won't find your meaning of being off the rail, it's not in your purse/wallet, it's not branded, not even if the logo is made from real gold and diamonds for diamanté. No, shopping doesn't cut it. That is unless you happen to like splurging your vast fortune on art. Contemporary art is dicey of course, the arts scene is fickle, an artist might be the talk of the town the year before, but most average billionaires can cope with a tax loss or two, I mean a few million is small change to most oil billionaire and hotel empire heiresses. Then there's the PR angle. If you're say Angelina Jolie, you're sitting in your agents sumptuous office fretting about your future Hollywood career after snatching Brad from a bimbo from TV's Friends, you need to change your image fast. Show your feelings. Feel empathy. In the course of that psychological and philosophical makeover, asides adopting starving orphans, dabbling in world politics and taking on more taxing roles in cinema, you could always buy some art? I mean on some protozoic level buying lots of Warhols makes Dennis Hopper appear to be an intellectual. Angelina likes Banksy, it's street rather than boulevard, it's edgy but not in a grumpy superstar fashion, and the media will lap it up, which they did.

So rich or rich and famous, either can traipse around the world looking something a tad less than superficial, buying art they don't understand as an investment because their accountant and PR people think it will be a hoot. Besides the paparazzi will be there and you can talk about your new movie, song, biography, fashion label, charitable cause or perfume. Plus there's all that glamour, booze, intellectual bigwigs to expand and wow your outer social circle. In truth it's a barely spiritually higher than interior design, for it is essentially still shopping. It always was.

There's a debate going on at The Saatchi Gallery on the 29th March, it's called 'Art Fairs are about money not art'. Personally I prefer my title, but hey Saatchi won't even acknowledge my emails so there's no use bleating. Doors open at 7pm, the debate starts at 7:30pm and finishes at 9pm. They're charging £15 which seems a rip to me, it's funny but if they'd made it free they'd have a far more balanced debate. Who's going to spend £5 an hour for an argument? People with money and too much time on their hands. Anyway, here's a plan, If I was rich, or even wealthy enough I could do stupid things with money I'd do this.

Find a few homeless people around London. Sort them out with deposits for bedsits, get them signed on at the dole, dried out if they need it, food on the table, all that jazz. Then I'd ask each of them to do me a favour. I'd buy them some cool clobber, one could look like a toff, dressed head to tail in tweed and a deer stalker and a monocle to top it off. Another can be a rock chick, faux fur and bling to the nines. The third, who knows, an art critic replete with Armani suit and Italian leather shoes. Then give them each a ticket to the debate and ask them to argue fanatically about total nonsense.

The toff could shout "I only buy old masters. I like oils, they go with the stags' heads!". The rock chick could reply with "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? Where's the V.I.P section?!?!". The critic should just intersperse the debate with expletives in French and German and then walk up to the chairman and throw their vino over him in disgust.

Now that would be fun…

So with so much apathy abound, what do you think our esteemed political class sees as the solution? Fame! Of course, why didn't I think of that? It has a catchy tabloid namesake too, 'personality politics'. We all know that all the major parties are useless, and despite the Tories crashing the stock market with their unfounded fears that a hung parliament will equate to the end of civilisation as we know it, the truth is they're all running scared. They're all corrupt, they're liars, and they mismanage anything they can get their dirty mitts on, so now they've taken a leaf from war criminal and failed European Presidential nominee Tony Blair's book and decided to pretend they're both likeable and like the public in turn. Gordon Brown is having the most trouble, a gruff and dour Scottish demeanour, a wonky false eye, the inability to smile or apologise for ruining the economy and funding an illegal war doesn't bode well in the popularity stakes. David Cameron is an unknown entity, slimy in character, most likely on David Icke's hit list of most probable lizard people in power, and has a bad habit of saying exactly what anyone tells him they want to hear. Even if it that particular strategy does result in massive swings in political direction and public derision. As for Nick Clegg, the leader of the third party The Liberal Democrats with their usual 10% to 15% of the vote. He's trying his best I suppose, but in truth he looks like a cross between a social worker and an organic farmer on the verge of crying because the factory farm next door regularly spews genetically modified poison over what used to be his hedgerows. So will fame and celebrity help any of them? The short answer is no.

As a kid I watched three very bland channels on a government approved televisual set, the presenters and actors were glib and tight-lipped on the BBC. Mainly because the BBC was squarely aimed at the middle classes, after all the poor couldn't afford TV, and by poor I mean the oppressed working classes. ITV on the other hand did all they could to separate themselves from such timid and deferential behaviour, be it an excessively loud, drunk and most definitely live audience, or racist, sexist, you-name-it-ist sitcoms, terrifyingly scary theme music for the news, or an abundance of awful, terrible, really terribly awful talent shows. 'Talent' being the inoperative word in that last example. Talent wasn't the point, the entertainment came from a lairy audience booing off yet another terrible local pub act. Very very few made it through the prime time ring of fire to minuscule celebrity, those who did were mainly singers and comedians, and were destined if not doomed to perform to decades of chicken in a basket dos, that is when there wasn't any bingo on that week. Fame wasn't really desired back then, most knew it was more work than it was worth and usually left to have a real life instead. Such as the star of 1960s musical extravaganza Oliver Twist, who became a dentist.

Nowadays everyone associates fame with success, and success with fortune, although they never used to go so merrily hand-in-hand. I grew up learning about legions of artists who starved to death in filthy garrets in relative obscurity. Unbeknownst to them many of their works are now sold for the equivalent of the annual GDP of a small South American country. They'd be kicking themselves if they weren't dead.  Luckily for egomaniacs, and unluckily for the rest of us who have to suffer their interminable optimism and dubious talents, if you want to be famous now you don't have to be particularly good at what you do. Even those who are spectacularly bad can become famous, although people insist on adding a couple of letters to the front. Say like George W. Bush, but who really doesn't wants the infamous badge on their lapel at the doors of a red carpet event. No. To receive genuinely positive acclaim, what you need to do is anything anyone tells you to, and smile throughout the whole experience, and if you manage to win any accolades for your substandard drivel, do make sure to thank God, not that I think he'd want to take credit for their screeching, grinning, and dismally bland performance.

If there's such thing as artistic kismet, then I think I'd stake my claim in the photography of Alison Jackson. A woman with a very clear and precise view on fame. It's corrupting and corruptible. It offers a veneer, carefully managed and honed by a team of experts, usually earning more than the personality in question, dedicated to lying to the public at every opportunity. Cheating on your wife doesn't win golf tournaments, it also doesn't make life easy for your sponsors. Same goes for declaring illegal wars in the Middle East, unless that is, you happen to have a massive stake in a Texan oil company.

Alison Jackson takes photos of what we all want to see, even if it hasn't happened, although to be honest nothing she does seems that far fetched, in fact exactly the opposite. Her photographs ring so true you'll probably get a headache. Take a look at what the Media say they don't want you to see because the authorities wouldn't let them, but deep down, they'd sell their souls for the chance.  Fake celebrities abound in Jackson's photos, keep an eye out for Nazi monarchs, dying presidents, a hotel heiress in prison and the obligatory sex scandals, which no piece on fame would be complete without.

See the rest of Alison Jackson's portfolio at http://www.mbfala.com/

Perspective for instance, or colour even. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about light and optics knows that in fact that nothing around us has a colour, it is for the main part the light reflected by objects and in certain cases transmitted that our retinae receive as wavelengths, our brains decipher this information and with a grounding of nurtured observational language we can associate the object in question with a word. The truth is our reality is little more than a collection of unidentifiable grey shapes, each layered imperceptibly over more objects, structures and spaces which are only queued by our visual cortex through the slimmest of clues, shadow formations, converging light and focus.

Anyway, back to the point. I am going to crush your head…

I'm rather fussy when it comes to photography, I like the old guard (sometimes the really old guard), Man Ray, Henri Cartier – Bresson, Weegee, Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman but my reasons are many and multiplicative. What I do know is that history wears down the imagination, we live in a limited space and we as a race seem to, for all our technological leaps, hit a brick wall when it comes to anything approximating an evolutionary jump in perception, either physically or philosophically. With food, water and space running out, there isn't much time for the masses to stand back and evaluate our existence these days, unless it's inspired by a little bible bashing or the cult of the celebrity. The fact is the photographers I appreciate are equivalent to mountain climbers in their genre, they go there first, they did it first, they planted their flags first. They are only a slice of the innovation pie I know, but I have a personally charged connection with many of their works, as I have with many paintings and movies. Photography is generally higher up on my perceptually pleasing list than say sculpture, though the grandest sculptural works, when encountered in the flesh, loom over even the most powerful of photographs. But when it comes to image, photography has made its impression on me over the years.

I suffer from a lack of depth of perception, it's a little like living in a camera, or rather having a camera lens as an eye, it's clinical, it's tempered by logic, and it takes imagination to pick out the highlights and lowlights of any scene in order to understand it fully. The process is near immediate now, I familiarise my surroundings, I can measure near objects, angles, and far horizons sufficiently to not notice the irregularities of my often synaesthetic mind. I use sound to judge distance more than most, asides those who are partially sighted or blind. But on the upside, it helps me appreciate all the more the work of these two charactes displaying their wares at Flickr. They are Jason E. Powell and Michael Hughes. Both masters of illusion and punch drunk heavyweight fighters for the reality afflicted. If you're somewhat dubious of your reality, if you have a habit of throwing a double take once in a while, if you glance at the world with peripheral vision from time to time, you should like these two.

Jason E. Powell – Looking into the Past

Looking Into the Past- Union Station Square, Washington, DC

Looking Into the Past- Leader Theater, 9th Street, Washington, DC

Looking Into the Past- Carvel Hall, Annapolis, MD

Looking Into the Past- Boy Scouts, US Capitol, Washington, DC

Michael Hughes – Souvenirs

Rio de Janeiro

Cadillac Ranch, Amarillo

Statue of Liberty

Eiffel Tower.

Anyway keep an eye out, reality does have a habit of giving up on ya when you least expect it

Paul Lung – an Hong Kong graphic artist who will spend on average a solid 60 hours on each sketch to achieve his terrifying level of photorealistic art. His work is rather like that of Juan Francisco Casas who also draws everything to high degree of realism (although personally not quite as much as Paul) and in ballpoint pen rather than Paul who tools himself with nothing more than a 0.5mm technical pencil to do the job, drawing anything and everything, from his family and friends to cats. His highly detailed work has been written about in newspapers like The Sun and Telegraph. See more of his hyperreal art at www.paullung.deviantart.com.

Here's a video showcasing his work…

Robert Bernardi born 1974 in Todi Italy is an amazingly accomplished oil painter, he's also a photographer, but you'd be hard stretched to tell the difference between his paintings and photographs! Remember you are looking at oil paintings! Visit his site at www.robertobernardi.com.

Doug Bloodworth – www.dougbloodworth.com – is a self-confessed Western Art nut, I mean that as in the Old West, cowboys and indians, as opposed to the Western hemisphere. Anyhow fortunately he also has a love for Pop Art and ultra realistic paintings. Check these out:

The last one is unfinished but I thought you might like to see some proof that these are in fact paintings.

Amazing eh?

My parents married far far too young, that's the truth, they've been divorced since my most formative years, and as Mum's life took a corner and landed in a far brighter and happier future, my father, well let's say he didn't live the most contented of lives, in fact bad luck and tragedy seemed to follow him wherever he went. I recognise the same in myself, but I have been luckier in many ways. A few years ago, after a very long estrangement, he contacted me, he was having financial troubles, and although we could hardly spare it ourselves, we managed to get him on his feet again. However the early death of his long-term partner Linda was the beginning of the end. He began to drink heavily, all the time, and it got the better of him.

I didn't want to write again, or at least publicly quite yet, because I knew no matter what I wrote about the subject would always steer towards my father's death, but perhaps, on some level, this post might help someone else out there in the same position. I am not a religious man, my beliefs are vague and unsubstantiated when it comes to life beyond the carbon-based lifeforms we inhabit in a space-time continuum of our own description, and at least psychologically, our own making. Without the constructs of pragmatic ritual, without the roots of traditional metaphorical behaviour and rites practised by churches of all description, I've had to emotionally live by my wits, perceptually advance my understanding of existence. Perhaps to make a formal attempt to find solace, make some vague sense of the events unfolding, give purpose to a tragedy. However I know deep down it's all part of a simple process, a natural one that can take any form depending on one's character, in order to help each of us physically and mentally remain sound throughout times like these. I know one thing and that is that art helps. Art really helps. For the last few days I haven't been able to pick up a pen without scrawling like a lunatic, embittered doodles without form or meaning, but the art of others, other minds and visions, that helps. Visually consuming difference, that helps. It's not what I see, it what I interpret through others, their vision of the world around us, and/or its possibilities.

Recently I discovered the art of Alex Andreyev, his work isn't what most would describe as particularly comforting and peaceful, not by any means, but his habit of twisting the parameters of the familiar and benign charges my mind to some extent, if only to remember the delights of possibility again, be they good or bad. Which, when you think about it, on a universal scale, is simply highly subjective quibbling. Alex Andreyev is based in Saint-Petersburg Russia, and has been working as a digital and graphic artist for over 20 years. Now working almost exclusively digitally with basic Photoshop and Corel, he limits his brushes and presets to maintain a feeling of reality in his art works, avoiding the over production of many of those in his field. He describes his work as surrealism, but to me his art steers towards a sub-genre, not quite invented yet, that inserts, incepts and intercepts brief moments of familiarity with an unnerving feeling that just beyond the the oblivion of the obvious lies something vast, something tearing at the seams of our own dimension, frightening yet awe inspiring, a reality that makes a mockery of our own assumptions of our brief existence here on Earth. A microcosm of the grand fantasist movement jam packed with every Freudian and Jungian treat on offer.

Andreyev offers an allegorical pinhole view of possible and alternate futures, presents and pasts, slithers of something else, somewhere else, imbued with a strong sense of familiarity that can at times bring on a shiver or two of recognition. The art works range in style, some of the most powerful appear more like doctored photographs, and in turn are rather reminiscent of some of the trick photography adopted by the Spiritualist movement of the Victorian era, in order to further their cause of disproving the sceptics and gaining respect for their wild claims within both the church and science.

I, as did my father, love the late 60's and early 70's take on sci-fi, everything, everywhere was a conspiracy of some kind, perhaps it's a family tradition to think the worst in order not to be disappointed in the long run, I can't really tell you that one objectively. However I have always taken some kind of gratification in seeing the shapes and patterns of society, politics, technology, and more in order to prepare myself for the next bolt from the blue. Sci-fi used to be good at that too, nowadays it's filled with glibly hopeful sentiments, mainly that technology will save the day, or  obversely provides a downright apocalyptic, vision with no chance for anyone to do anything about it. Still, Andreyev has for me taken the right and most pertinent angle when it comes to sci-fi's influence on his work, an eerie feeling that our lack of knowledge about the true nature of our consensual reality leaves us grappling with the idea that we may be missing something here, something really big, something that should we all encounter it simultaneously, would  either collapse our society in sudden fright or evolve us instantly with the delights of a new found wonder.

Who knows. Life, it's a funny old game.

Anyway see more of Alex Andreyev and buy his large scale posters at www.alexandreev.com.

I suppose I could back it all the way up and say it's all down to hard graft, but I and many people I know work like the clappers to improve ourselves, struggle everyday to better ourselves, but it's a slow, deliberate and sometimes painful process. All the more painful when you realise just how far other artists have developed. If there does happen to be a nuclear war and the EMP wipes out all technology, it's more than likely that someone with the awe inspiring talent of Alyssa Monks will  probably be commissioned to record the event. After which the emergency committee will most likely ask her to start painting banknotes too, just to get the post-Armageddon economy off the ground.

The fact is, if you think you're a good painter, for your own well being, for the sake of your sanity, or even in a preventive measure to stop you crawling back into bed, don't look at this art. It is, I'm afraid to say, especially as I count myself in this number, (at the very least technically) better than yours. I could criticise the fascination with water, but I'd only be kidding myself, the truth is it's harder to draw opaquely obfuscated faces, it's even harder to paint. Portraiture has died and been reborn in a Monksian movement of one.

To see more hyper hyper realist paintings by Alyssa Monks visit www.alyssamonks.com.

When you have too many people for barter to be practical, you invent tokens, things or images that represent something else, rather like a sophisticated I.O.U system. Seeing as history only began to be written relatively recently, i.e a few thousands years, I can only imagine the arguments that ensued when the first forgers hit this world. Throwing stone-age farming implements to the ground to take up a bone chisel and score a simple mark on a shiny pebble. Before you know it they're living the proverbial life of Riley, perhaps not with all the latest mod cons, but with more animal skins than they'll ever need to keep the cave warm and toasty, a nice rack of finely carved wooden clubs, a herd of goats, and a small workforce of hairy dupes to do their bidding. It makes you think, how did our earliest tyrants and dictators evolve from mere local village bullies. How on earth did any early civilisation get started, that is, unless someone cheated along the way.

The biggest problem that most of us have with money, apart from not owning any, is that how few of us have so much of it. A slim percentage of civilisation hoard the lion's share, rather like emperors of old. My outspoken beliefs on the subject of money have dropped a few jaws in the past, especially whilst living in London, A city that crawls with the rich who until recently would pay staff to usher people like me out of the door whilst laughing amongst themselves from the comfort of sumptuous leather seating. Things have changed, don't get me wrong, I'm still not welcome anywhere prestigious, I have the dress sense, the pallor and general upstartedness of someone with little to show for himself, at least financially. They will still boot me out, or more likely keep me at a good distance from the front door. However no one, no matter how rich they are would disagree with my long held belief that the Stock Market is nothing more than a betting shop. The stakes are higher, the thoroughbreds are corporations and commodities, but the principle is more or less the same. You study the form, you take a punt.

As usual watching the world catch up with one of my many spurious opinions, this time via a painful recession, doesn't afford me any personal satisfaction, it's sad really, how the inevitable trundles along like a stubborn mule dragging a broken down cart, they get there in the end, but neither the journey nor the destination are particularly enlightening. So here's another favourite of mine, there is no such thing as money, it isn't there, it's simply a complicated system of the wealthiest hoarding their treasure troves of I.O.U's. Eventually the world will wake up and realise there just isn't enough on our tiny planet for the immoral minority of the super rich to spend it on, there are after all only so many luxury yachts and trips to the moon our natural resources can bear before we'll all be scrabbling around the rubbish tips trying to salvage what we can at the very zenith of humanity. Let's use a comparison, a rather simple one and that is coal.

For tens of thousands of years Man lived was forced to live within his limits. He could see how many trees were left to burn to keep warm and cook up some Woolly Mammoth steaks before he and his tribe would have to move on. Sure, it's not a perfect system, but it still sustained the human race and Earth for aeons. Then one day he discovered fossil fuels, coal was literally lying around on the ground in many parts of the world, a few simple tools and he was set. The fact is that coal and oil are equivalent to receiving thousands of years of energy from the sun, made up from rotten flora, fauna and animals devastated by some natural disaster millions of years ago. Oil would prove to be more tricky, it would be a very long while before Man could tap into the deepest reserves, and in the meantime he came up with a few solutions based on some of the most twisted and evil logic our race has ever encountered. He'd use people. Slaves. Slavery did more than demean Mankind, it also held back the development of alternative technologies. One of those being the extraction and refinement of oil. Eventually, due to the need to continually pump out water from yet deeper and deeper coal mines he stumbled across steam power, and soon the Industrial Age was upon us.

However oil was the real turning point, it meant that rather than enslave his fellow Man, he could afford to live a more just existence, using technology of his own making, powered by the incredible energy harnessed within this black and slimy substance to, without being dramatic, conquer the world. Oil brought about more freedoms than anyone could have ever imagined. Take a look around you, the plastic casings of every piece of technology in your house, the contents of your bathroom cabinet, the carpet, the rug, the paint on your walls and doors, almost everything has either been produced via the enormous power of oil or even contains a bi-product of oil. Everything is oil, oil is the greatest I.O.U the human race has ever written, and it's nearly time to pay up. The day we run out of oil you may as well burn your money to keep warm, because it won't be worth a penny, not even symbolically. Right now the USD$ is worth around 4 cents, this is its true value, not a made-up value based upon the money markets, not a speculative stab in the dark by a jaded banker, but its real and honest value. Inflation was invented to cover up the fact that as governments print more and more money to fund more and more so-called economic growth it loses its value. Asides human beings, money is the only other thing on this planet that continues to increase in supply, all natural resources are depleting, as are most animals, fish, plants, and even clean air and water, and of course fossil fuels.

We are busted, the kitty is empty, the piggy bank lies shattered in pieces on the ground, and soon all we will be able to buy with plastic is more plastic. In the meantime, we might all be able to learn a lesson or two about what to do with our money in the near future from Mark Wagner. This must be the last man on earth still having fun with currency, asides the hoardes of origami nuts that abound on the net. If you love money you might want to turn away now, this is going to be painful for you. As for me, I call it creative accountancy.

Unless you're a real stunner, with the face of an angel and the body of a god, or simply incredibly, incredibly vain, you probably don't enjoy people taking photos of you. At least that's how the theory goes, just skim through any magazine, or force yourself to sit through a bout of TV ads and all you'll see are, at the very least, perfectly attractive people, and if not, even the uglies have character, they'd be the pin-ups for the uglies around our way. But there's more to it, that is to day, the dubious pleasure or torture of being photographed, and that's got to be the standing still and waiting with a fixed grin, whilst what seems to be the rest of the world stops and stares at the idiots smiling at a beauty spot somewhere. Then there's the disappointment afterwards where you'll weigh up lighting and composition with other factors like a bad hair day, a spot, or general wear and tear.

I never liked people taking photographs of me as a kid, my mum had to do her best to hide those of me, by the age of ten I had managed to destroy most of the Polaroids (yes it was the 70s) that featured even the slightest glimpse of my face. Nowadays things are different, the youth, the tweens, teens and twenties are so bang in to cellphones that it's inevitable that millions upon millions of them have photos of themselves, each other, and anyone else they can find in between. But way back when phones sat on a small table by the front door, it was a rather horrendous process for most kids. The two worst being the school photo, where a few hundred kids would stand and stare vacantly for an incompetent photographer to 'get the light just right'. and photo-booths, perhaps one of the most traumatizing inventions ever created. More like an instrument of social torture, after years of jumping in with mates and girlfriends for a laugh, the time came when all of us for whatever official sounding reason, be it a passport or a job application, would need to smarten ourselves up and sit for an excruciatingly uncomfortable minute, and then hover outside in the hope of masking the results from the wider public.

For whatever reasons, perhaps lateness for a train or plane, or in the rush to pack up after a fractious split with a partner, the time will come when all of us will leave a photo of ourselves behind, be it at the airport, station, back of a cab, ex-partners' bed, or down the back of a bookshelf we haven't cleaned in a million years. That is when the site www.isthisyou.co.uk in true Duchampian fashion steps in, their loyal followers go out of the way to find what you have lost, primarily photos of strangers. Photos that others have, for whatever reason, if any, have left behind in a public space. What's more, most likely through word-of-mouth, a sizeable slice of them are reclaimed by their original owners, you can tell which ones as their thumbnails state 'found'.

If you're a fan of Marcel Duchamp's 'Readymades', found objects he himself took the bold notion of introducing to the art gallery system, such as his 1917 piece, La Fontaine for instance, a urinal straight from the factory signed by R.Mutt, a worker on the production line, then you can see the attraction for me, at least, in the concept behind 'Is This You'. The format is a powerful array of lost identities, people in their everyday lives, places and objects, are forced into the limelight and viewed by the public as 'something else', a something else that I'd suggest is art. Not the photos themselves as much as the arrangement, the system of imagery displayed, without context or purpose. Almost like a lost property office for people, a gallery of life's snippets, a scatterlogical snapshot of humanity itself. ITY brings up many questions and ideas, the value of technology for instance, when photography was first invented it was a rare and precious pleasure to be photographed, usually in an official or historical capacity, recording the lives and events of society at the time. Genetic differentiation is another, the multiplicity of features, colours and creeds, or simply as an archive of a time when for many it seems that we the human race are drowning in our own number.

I as a child once came across a box of old photographs in an attic, they weren't of myself or my family, but of what I assume were former owners of our home, people who had lived whole lives in the same space, yet a different reality than me. One of my first reactions was an underlying emotional reaction something like grief watered down to a homoeopathy of mild trepidation and a veneer of respect. The fact is that I instinctively knew I was looking at imagery of the dead, and as a young boy this was an alien experience for me, something I wouldn't experience again for quite a few years.

Another most fascinating section to the site features lost and found ephemera, notes, many scrawled onto the nearest available source of paper, offering little insight into others' lives but instead revealing the shared mundanity we all live through each day in our attempt to keep up with a vast and over-complicated system we call society. Everyday lives taken out of context, freeze framed moments from unknown lives offer something painfully familiar, depressingly even.

There's a poetry to this site, a strangely beguiling longing that exudes from their collection of lost people, places, things and ideas. Something akin to the shop in 'Bagpuss', although their are no mice on the mouse organ to fix it this time. See more lost identities at www.isityou.co.uk.

There are a few other sites that offer something similar if you fancy getting lost in a world of found imagery and objects…

Dave's found photos

Pictures i found on the street

Going Underground: London underground fan site

Found Magazine

Crude Multimedia

Yahoo 'found photography' links

Joachim Schmid archive

Lost Something?

Well it seems that life, all be it for artists, has hit an all-time low. After asking for over six months to be removed from the mailing list of the arts scam site at www.neopoprealismstarz.com

They have finally relented with these passing words… "Haha, we didn't see your name in NY Times yet or in MOMA, as other participants but you already so high!!" I'd like to see how many artists these scammers have managed to get into MOMA, I'm guessing, erm… none?

Let me warn all of you, don't touch this site, don't pass them a single dime, they are the grubbiest, filthiest, crappiest scammers that have dragged themselves out of the gutter in an aeon. First off they lie, incessantly, they don't even allow you to contact them properly, they use a PO BOX address and if you do ever manage to track down a phone number I bet my bottom dollar you will be greeted by a cheesy answering machine.

The judges are never named, I'm guessing it's just the scammers and their junkie whore friends pulling names out of a hat judging by the state of the winners. The prizes are totally inflated, most seem to be ugly ceramics manufactured by artists of the least recognition and priced exorbitantly to pull in the punters. What's more, they charge money for every contest, they charge artists for an online contest? Yep. There's no excuses there, no way of blaming it on shipping and handling, storage, or man hours, I mean does anyone pay you to browse through Flickr? They make money for nothing, and to rub even more salt into the wound, they even spam their past contestants who've fell for the lure of their fake contests with a chance of being featured in one of their god awful publications.

Yes, NeoPopRealism Starz actually operate a double-scam, first a 'virtual vanity gallery' and then when you thought things couldn't get any worse, a 'virtual vanity publishers', two bum deals for the price of one. Well no, the bills just keep pouring in as a matter of fact, they pretend to make cut-price deals all the way through their flood of hyped spam, insisting they can only spare each artist a few copies, and if you pay now you'll be one of the 'lucky' ones. If there's one site I had to choose to die, one online venture that makes me sick to the gut, it would be NeoPopRealismStarz.com, filled with greedy vermin taking advantage of artists around the world to line their pockets, with no taste or understanding of the arts, humanity, or simply fair play, they truly deserve to rot in their self-made hole of oblivion for a few millennia.

Whatever you do don't go near them, don't talk to them, and never ever pay them. They are the most vile of all arts scammers, and they never stop lying.

PimpArtworks.com, where you can find some of my work, is offering some great prizes in their latest competition. Simply take a photograph of a PimpArtworks sticker in the most bizarre location and win either the…

1st Prize – X Large Perspex Acrylic Print of your choice (they'll commission the artist).

Loads of Runners up Prizes – including Hoodies, T-shirts, Prints, Record Bags.

Flyer and Sticker packs are going out free of charge to all their artist members who have work uploaded to the site. For everyone else email info@pimpartworks.com to find out how to get hold of yours.

Free Sticker Pack for all entrants! All entries will be posted here on their blog at http://pimpartworks.blogspot.com. Simply email your photos to enter (if you want to remain anonymous just let them know).