We Love the System, God Help the Artist [Part 1]
On the cultural hatred that hollows out the people who make the things we claim to love and why we keep choosing the machine over the hand that feeds it.
There is a line from the artist Alvaro Barrington, from an interview with Louisiana Channel, the media arm of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, that has been rattling around in my mind for months. He was speaking specifically about the fine art world, about galleries and collectors. But the observation stretched further (for me) than he perhaps intended, reaching out past painting and into the whole of our cultural moment. He said, in essence, that there is a hatred for the artist and a love of the system.
It is a devastating diagnosis. And once you hear it, you cannot unhear it. You start to see it everywhere. In the way we stream. In the way we watch. In the way we talk about culture as though we are its great defenders while systematically depriving the people who create it of the conditions they need to survive, let alone flourish.
Barrington, who was born in Caracas to Haitian and Grenadian parents, raised between the Caribbean and Brooklyn, and now works out of London, is not a bitter man raging at the machine. He is, if anything, the opposite: grateful, communal, deeply invested in the idea that art should reach people rather than sit behind velvet ropes. He opens his studio to other artists, maintaining a practice that is as collaborative as it is personal. He curated an entire show called Artists I Steal From, a gesture of radical transparency. He is, in other words, someone who believes in the connective tissue of culture. Which is precisely what makes his observation so pointed.
The Platform is the Art
As it relates to our business, the studio system has done extraordinary things. Almost every important film ever made exists because an institution believed in it, financed it, and got it to an audience that would not have found it otherwise. That relationship between institution and artist built the canon we still reference today. I believe in that relationship. I have built a career around it. But it is changing, and what is at stake is not abstract. We are at risk of losing entire tiers of filmmaking. The bottom and the middle, where most of the risk is taken, where most of the new voices emerge, where the next canonical films are being conceived right now by people who cannot get a meeting, are disappearing.
At the biggest studios and streamers, the relationship between institution and work has become what Spotify is for music. The streaming wars forced legacy studios to chase the technology companies that had disrupted them, and in doing so they imported something they had never previously had to contend with: the platform logic of Silicon Valley, where content is a feature, engagement is the product, and the technology itself is what you are actually selling. In the tech world, the artist was never the point. The platform was always the point. Engagement metrics, watch time, subscriber retention, these are the signals that matter, and they have very little to do with whether a film is good and everything to do with whether it kept you from canceling.
The content exists to serve the platform. The platform is what people subscribe to, return to, and feel loyal toward. The filmmaker, like the musician, is upstream of all that loyalty and receives a diminishing share of what it generates. Disney does not need you to love any particular film. It needs you to love Disney. Netflix does not need you to care about a director. It needs you to keep your subscription active.
What We Gave Up to Get Here
Silicon Valley did not solve the content problem so much as extract from it. Build the platform, open the gates, and let the creators come to you. Let the artist make the work, grow the audience, absorb every risk and cover every cost. When something breaks through, the platform captures the value. YouTube did not develop creators. It provided the infrastructure and collected the upside. Instagram did not invest in photographers. It built the gallery, kept the building, and paid nothing for what went on the walls. No creative taste required, no financial exposure whatsoever, and no obligation to the people generating the value.
And yet that logic migrated into an industry that had spent a century operating on an entirely different premise. Because what the studios have abandoned is development. And when I say development, I do not mean purely the development of a script, though that too. I mean the development of people. The unglamorous, expensive, relationship-dependent process of finding a filmmaker early, believing in them before the market has validated that belief, investing in who they are becoming rather than who they have already proven themselves to be, and bearing the financial and creative risk of that bet over time. That pipeline, which produced the careers we now treat as canonical, has been largely dismantled.
Why develop a filmmaker over years when you can simply wait for indie producers to do it for you, then buy the finished result at Sundance? The studios have outsourced their creative risk to the people least able to carry it. Independent producers are expected to spend years, sometimes a decade, raising financing across a dozen different sources, writing grants, cold-calling strangers, attaching talent, covering the festival campaign out of pocket, because the campaign itself is now the audition. And before any of that, there is the production. The shoot that required calling in every favor, maxing every relationship, protecting the director's vision on deferred pay and borrowed time. All of it funded, all of it risked, none of it reimbursed until the system decides the film is worth its attention. The indie producer arrives at a festival not as a participant in an industry but as a supplicant to one. The studio buyers walk the market and take the best of it. The filmmaker gets a deal, if they are lucky. Then they go home and start raising money for the next one.
It is no wonder that more filmmakers are exploring what it looks like to own more of what they make, to build direct relationships with audiences, to arrive at the table with options rather than appeals. When you are the one carrying the development risk, the financing risk, the production risk, the question of who controls the outcome stops being philosophical and becomes practical.
This is not a counsel against the studio system. It is an argument for understanding it clearly and participating in it on the most informed terms possible. The market has shifted toward acquisition over development. That is the current reality, and the most important thing an independent filmmaker can bring to any room is a clear understanding of the one they are walking into. Knowing that is not bitterness. It is essential.
And not unlike Barrington, the writer of this piece was born in Los Angeles, to Danish and Filipino parents, raised between Los Angeles, Copenhagen, and Manila, and works out of Los Angeles. He is not a bitter man raging at the machine. He is, if anything, grateful for the terrain, communal by instinct, and deeply invested in the idea that the artist's work should reach people and not wait for permission. (This is the only time I will refer to myself in the third person.)
None of this is to flatten every institution into the same indictment. There is a tier of specialty labels still fighting the good fight, and they deserve to be named for it. Focus Features, Neon and others have built their whole identities around a belief I find genuinely moving: that a singular film, made by a singular voice, is worth financing and worth selling on its own terms. They take real risk on first features. They mount campaigns for films the platform logic would never bother to surface. They treat a director's career as something to nurture and protect rather than a title to acquire and forget. We should praise them, loudly and often, because praise is one of the few currencies that still flows in their direction. But praise alone is not enough. It would be naïve to pretend these labels are not vastly outgunned, outspent and out-marketed by the trillion dollar platforms competing for our attention. They need more than our applause. They need resources, distribution muscle, theatrical commitments, and an audience willing to show up in the first window. They are doing the hard, faithful work of keeping a whole tier of cinema alive, and they cannot do it alone. If we mean what we say about loving the artist over the system, the specialty label is exactly the kind of institution worth cherishing, and worth funding.
What Barrington's Fine Art World Shows Us
Back in the gallery world from which Barrington's observation emerged, the dynamic is both more visible and more extreme. The art market is one of the most flagrant examples of a system that has entirely absorbed the meaning of what it claims to celebrate. Works change hands for sums that would feed small nations while the artists who made them, in many cases, receive nothing from secondary sales. The galleries and auction houses and collectors are the protagonists of the art market story. The artists are the raw material.
And this has shaped, in subtle and not so subtle ways, what art gets made. Artists who want to survive learn to make work that the system wants. Galleries have house aesthetics. Collectors have preferences that function as gravitational fields. The biennial circuit rewards certain kinds of conceptual language. The result is not that no interesting art gets made. The result is that a great deal of potentially extraordinary art never gets made because the artist who might have made it learned, at some early and formative moment, that the system would not sustain it.
Barrington is interesting precisely because he has managed to work within the system without being entirely consumed by it. He is represented by eight galleries globally. He sells. He is on Artsy's most influential list. And yet he still makes his art out of yarn and burlap and Caribbean hibiscus flowers and Tupac and Marcus Garvey and things that do not obviously ask permission from the market to exist. He has maintained, against considerable pressure, the insistence that his work should be personal. He has said that art should be strong and non-conformist and most importantly should always be personal. In the current climate, this reads almost as a manifesto of resistance.
The Audience We Have Become
It would be easy to make this a story about corporate greed… about Spotify and Disney and auction houses rigging the game. They are, to varying degrees, doing exactly that. But the more honest version implicates the audience too. Us. The people who say we love culture while making choices that hollow it out.
We encounter culture constantly. We just rarely follow it back to its source. We watch the film but never seek out the director's next one. We hear the song but not the album. We see the painting and move on. The encounter happens, but the relationship doesn't form. And so we default, not out of malice but out of habit, to the major platforms, the major franchises, the algorithm that decides what comes next.
What if the problem is not contempt but something more structural, a gap between stated values and actual behavior? Audiences express genuine appreciation for art and artists in the abstract while consistently failing to support the conditions that allow artists to work. We respond to the output. Is the result a culture that celebrates creativity while underfunding the people who practice it? And if so, is that a choice, or simply what happens when we stop deliberating about where our support actually goes?
Toward Something Better
None of this is to suggest that platforms are without value, or that every transaction with a corporation is a moral failure. The question is one of balance and awareness. Listening to Spotify is not the same as supporting music. Streaming a film is not the same as supporting cinema. Liking an Instagram post is not the same as sustaining an artistic practice. They can coexist, but only if we understand the difference.
What would it mean to actually love the artist rather than the system? It would mean buying directly when possible. It would mean shouting about them from the rooftops when you can. It would mean going to the opening, attending the reading, seeing the film in the theater instead of waiting for the stream. It would mean following a filmmaker across their career rather than a studio's release schedule. It would mean occasionally choosing the unknown over the branded. It would mean, occasionally, caring about where the money goes when we spend it.
Barrington frames the artist's responsibility in terms of honesty. The artist must be honest about how they see the world. But there is a corollary responsibility that falls on the audience. We must be honest about what we are actually doing when we say we love art. Whether we love it, or whether we love the system that delivers it, packaged and frictionless and algorithmically optimized, at a monthly cost we barely notice.
This is not a new problem. It is an old one that has found more efficient tools. And if you have spent any time making things, you stop being bitter about it eventually. You see it clearly, you accept it, and then you look for the opportunity. Because there is always an opportunity. The same fragmentation that has made it harder to sustain a career has also made it possible to own one in ways that were not available before. That is where the real work is happening now, in projects built around direct relationships, genuine ownership, and the belief that the audience exists and is worth finding on your own terms.
The distinction matters more than we have allowed ourselves to believe. Art is made by people. People are fragile. They need money and time and the knowledge that what they are making is being received by someone who actually chose it, who sought it out rather than having it served by an algorithm. The system does not need this kind of attention. The system scales without it. The artist does not scale. The artist is irreducibly singular, which is, of course, the whole point.
Alvaro Barrington, in his London studio at some hour of the night, is making a case for the world simply by making the work. He is betting that someone will care enough to look at it on its own terms. That the artist might yet be worth loving in the same way we have learned to love the system.
How to Support the Artist, Seven Things Anyone Can Do:
Buy it opening weekend, release day, launch day. The first window is the one that gets measured, whether it's a film, an album, a painting or a book. That is the moment your participation counts most.
Pay for the work directly. Bandcamp, Patreon, a filmmaker's own platform, a writer's Substack, money that goes directly to the artist goes somewhere different than a streaming subscription or a corporate retailer.
Tell someone about it. The marketing budgets are shrinking or gone. Word of mouth is not. One real person telling another real person is still the most powerful marketing tool ever invented.
Show up to the events. The club show, the festival screening, the gallery opening, the reading at the independent bookstore. The audience that shows up early is the one that makes the next thing possible.
Follow the artist. Subscribe to their newsletter, follow their channel, buy from their store. The relationship between you and the person making the work should not require an intermediary.
Engage like it matters, because it does. A comment, a share, a review - not for the algorithm, but because the artist made something and deserves to know someone saw it.
An opportunity to change our thinking. Stop waiting for something to be big before you care about it. The audience that finds the work early is the one that sustains it.
To my friends and family who have done all of these things from the beginning, thank you. This series was written from the conviction that the audience is not gone, and I know that to be true because I have had one my entire life.
(This is part 1 of 3. Part Two: They Will Tell You the Well Is Dry While They Are Swimming in It - is out now.)
