Dump Year-End Kudos

"Dump.fm - IRL" at 319 Scholes is included in Paddy Johnson's 10 Best Exhibitions of 2010 list for the L Magazine.

The collective picture formed was that of a unique community of makers, each using a lexicon of stock images, internet slang and animated gifs. This is the new art we've been waiting to see for the last 30 years.

Congratulations to curator Lindsay Howard and all the other dumpers. It's important to note that although people were invited by the curator to be in the "IRL" show, anyone can sign up for dump.fm. That great work emerges without a single cult of personality (are Ryder, Scottbot and TimB the new Judy Chicago?) or institutional involvement of any kind is indeed something rather new. That it's an amorphous sort of electronic, sign-manipulating art requiring presence and participation--almost like a game but with a surfeit of hard-to-evaluate creative work product rather than a score* as a result--will make it very hard to co-opt.

*fav hustlers notwithstanding