This is the bit where I tidy up loose ends. In the process, I'm going to have to talk about photography, which is a bit of a challenge for someone who's never owned a 'proper' camera. I have to though, because I'm responding to this.

... photography is about time and place and moment and occurrence and coincidence, and revealing banality, and so on, in a way that previous mediums (such as painting) aren't. If we use or consume photography simply as (for example) painting (as the photo-secessionists did), we are missing the point of its uniqueness.

I'm really not seeing why painting can't be just as much about all of those things. Or sculpture or verse, for that matter. Striqun says photographs capture, better than most media, moments in historical time. I don't see why it captures them better. Of course it captures them more realistically, and of course that realism has its virtues and its possibilities, but I don't see why a photograph of a Parisian couple kissing in the street in Paris is a better capturing of a moment than Bernini's Apollo and Daphne.

There is one supreme virtue that photography has, which is its democratisation of the image. He refers to this when he talks about having a personal record of ageing, and I take his point to be that everyone can have a liftime of photographs of themselves, whereas only Popes and Chancellors get to have a lifetime of painted portraits.

He mentioned the photo I have on my living room wall as a perfect example of what photography can do. There's a tale that goes with that picture. My friend Gary went travelling round Cuba, Guatemala and Belize, and he took his digital camera with him. He also took one of those miniature hand-held printers that do you a photograph in a couple of minutes. He took loads of pictures of people, and everyone he photographed got a copy. Lots of his subjects had never had a picture of themselves before. Now that's how to democratise the image. His online gallery is here at gallery 2C, by the way.

So Striqun's right about that. And it makes absolutely no sense to limit photography to the painterly style. Yet apart from the early photo-seccessionists, I'm not sure who does. Certainly not photographic artists.

And anyway, what people do on Flickr, that's not photography. It uses cameras, but it's not photography as Striqun means it. Except for the ones that run their own little Flickr-secessionist movement, futilely protesting against the intrusion of Photoshop into their homages to Cartier-Bresson.

For what's happening on Flickr, and in other places, is new. Back in the Eighties many of us got quite excited about the graphic novel. Some of you probably still are, and I wouldn't disrespect the form. That thing where people take pictures, put them on their computer, muck about with them loads, a bit or not at all and then hang them out in cyberspace for the world to comment, that's the graphic novel of our age. I just tried to type that's a new art form, but it came out as that's a new fart form, and I thought maybe my fingers were trying to tell me something. You know what I mean though.

Although it still does all the stuff he said. It's still a democratising medium. That's why so much of it is rubbish. It's also a record of people's lives, and so on. I use it in class, actually. Say I've got some Somali students in the group, I might get them to search Flickr for pictures of Hargeisa or Mogadishu. They see places they know, and click on the link to see who took the picture. It's usually somebody else from the Somali diaspora, in Belgium or Canada or somewhere, and I explain how to get in touch with them.

This conversation arose when we were talking about zombizi's exhibition. He does all those other things too. When he does ophelia, it's a moment in time, and a snapshot of a human life. It's just got other stuff going on as well.

But the art is the thing with him, and he's actually very good at it. I'm seeing through a glass darkly with his work most of the time, but I can see there's stuff there, even if I'm not always quite sure what it is. I'd find it easier if it had more Romans in it. I think he deliberately avoids the whole subject of ancient Rome just to annoy me.

While you, striqun, you do this. Why isn't this art?

That'll do on this, now. I'm getting bored with it, and rumblings of discontent in my audience have reached me. Yes you, on Smeaton Road, I'm talking about you. I see and hear all you know. Yea, ye shall know the fear of me, and thou shall not come out of the fire, that ye shall taste of my vengeance.

I'm sorry, that's the Qur'an coming back. I keep pushing it down, but it keeps popping out again. Tomorrow, football.