Paddy Johnson quotes Ryder Ripps:
“Art lives within society, and society by definition is social,” he says. “So if you’re not making an impact on many people, you’re not going to be a known artist. There’s the folk model, the Henry Dargers of the world who get discovered after the fact, but to me that’s really bleak and not glamorous at all.”
If the choice is between (a) schmoozer, attention junkie, and starter-of-a-million-projects and (b) Henry Darger, I'll take "(b)," minus the sexual kinks and closet serial killer accusations, if possible. Darger created a world to escape into because he could barely function in "(a)" mode--that's not depressing, it's kind of beautiful.
As for Ripps' work, his GIFs are great and co-creating a website (dump.fm) where they could be part of a common pictorial language is enough to earn him canonical status, whatever the value of all the later bonding and site creation might be. Even outsiders could "shut up and dump."