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, captured during 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 and the machinery of contemporary taste. But the observation stretched further (for me) than he perhaps even 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.
[Insert Studio] and the Branding of Prestige
[The Studio] is the great cultural example of our moment, [The Studio] whose logo now functions as a kind of taste certification, a signal that whatever you are about to watch has been selected and curated and presented by people who understand cinema the way it deserves to be understood. And to be fair, [The Studio] has supported genuinely extraordinary work.
But notice what has happened culturally. The [The Studio] brand has become the thing people love. The filmmakers are secondary. They are the content inside the packaging. You will meet people who describe themselves as devoted fans of [The Studio] who cannot tell you who directed three of its most celebrated films. The studio has achieved something remarkable and troubling: it has made itself the artist. It has inserted itself between the audience and the work and claimed the loyalty that the work generated. When a film wins awards, [The Studio] wins awards. When a director makes a masterpiece, [The Studio's] brand equity rises. The director's relationship to that equity is, to put it generously, indirect.
This is a structural version of what happens to artists in every medium. The platform takes the relationship. The system captures the audience's devotion. The artist gets the credit in the form of a festival mention and the knowledge that their vision has been beautifully packaged by someone else who will profit from it more durably than they will.
Consider how rarely we seek out films the way we once did, hunting down a director's back catalog, following an editor or a cinematographer across different projects, treating cinema as the product of specific human sensibilities worth knowing intimately. Instead we check what [The Studio] is releasing next. We consult the algorithm. We let the system tell us what we want, and then we congratulate ourselves on our taste.
(And before anyone objects: yes, those people exist. The ones who can name the editor, who follow a composer from film to film, who treat a director's filmography like a body of literature worth reading in full. I know them too. But they are not the majority.)
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 either. He is, if anything, grateful for the terrain, communal by instinct, and deeply invested in the idea that the work should reach people rather than wait behind a red carpet for permission to exist.
What the studios have abandoned, and what rarely gets said out loud, is development. The unglamorous, expensive, relationship-dependent process of finding a filmmaker early, believing in them before the market has validated that belief, and bearing the financial risk of helping them become who they are capable of becoming. That pipeline, which produced the careers we now treat as canonical, has been largely dismantled. In its place is something far cheaper: acquisition.
The logic is not complicated. Why develop a filmmaker over years, absorbing the cost and uncertainty of that process, when you can simply wait for indie producers to do it for you and then buy the finished result at Sundance? The studios have outsourced their creative risk to people who can least afford to carry it. Independent producers who cannot make a living on current wages are expected to spend years raising financing, sometimes across a dozen different sources, attaching talent, shepherding projects through development, and then covering the festival campaign largely out of pocket, because the campaign itself is now the audition. And before any of that, there is the production itself. The shoot that required calling in every favor, maxing every relationship, and finding money. All of it funded, all of it risked, none of it reimbursed until the system decides the film is worth its attention.
IndieWire's Dana Harris-Bridson put it plainly in a recent analysis: the overnight sale, the version of Sundance that shaped decades of filmmaker strategy, is now an outlier. (Thank you for sharing this article with me Andrew) Buyers concentrate on fewer titles, at fewer festivals, with less urgency and less capital. At Sundance 2025, there were three sales during the festival itself. Eventually, about three-quarters of the program secured some form of distribution. It took most of the calendar year to get there. By 2026, almost nothing sold within the confines of the festival, and a lot of early buzz did not pay off. The market had not recovered so much as recalibrated around a new and harsher logic: buyers were tactical with their dollars, not overspending, and the few remaining players were more selective, prioritizing films with established lead talent or a proven directorial track record. What that means in practice is that there were years where most of the competition films landed some kind of distribution deal, and now there are fewer. Filmmakers, meanwhile, still build production timelines around submission deadlines, rush unfinished cuts, hold back material that could build an audience, all to be among thousands of submissions competing for a handful of slots that may or may not generate a meaningful outcome. The math has never been more unfavorable, and the people absorbing the loss are the ones who could least afford it.
This is the development pipeline now. It runs on the invisible labor of people the system will never formally employ. The indie producer who has spent three years raising money, finding locations, keeping a crew together, and finally getting a film made, arrives at a festival not as a participant in an industry but as a supplicant to one. The studio buyers walk the market, see what survived, and acquire the best of it. The filmmaker gets a deal, if they are lucky, and the knowledge that next time they will need to do it all again.
It is no wonder that more filmmakers are trying to own their distribution outright, to build direct relationships with audiences before the gatekeepers arrive. We are the ones taking the risk. The development risk, the financing risk, the production risk. It stands to reason that we should own more of what that risk produces. Not out of bitterness, but out of logic. The alternative, genuflecting before a market that no longer takes bets so much as ratifies them, has become its own kind of dead end. The studios are not developing new voices. They are not financing new visions. They are acquiring proven ones, at the moment of maximum leverage, from people who had no choice but to prove themselves first.
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 comfortable to make this purely 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 of this story implicates the audience, too. Us. The people who claim to love culture while making choices that hollow it out.
We do not go to see films by directors we have never heard of. We do not seek out painters whose work we encountered once in a group show and found ourselves thinking about for weeks afterward. We do not read small magazines where the writers are paid almost nothing but the writing is sometimes extraordinary. We subscribe to the major platforms and we watch the major franchises and we listen to what the algorithm serves us and we call this engagement with culture. It is engagement with the system that delivers culture. It is not the same thing.
The hatred Barrington describes is not contempt, exactly. It is something more passive and therefore more insidious. It is indifference dressed as appreciation.
We love the idea of the artist. We love what the artist produces in the abstract, the way it makes us feel, the identity it confers upon us as consumers with taste. What we do not love, or at least what our behavior consistently fails to support, is the actual artist. The person who gets up and makes the thing. The person who needs to eat while doing it. The system, however, we support without question.
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 consciousness. Of knowing that Spotify is not the same as supporting music, that [The Studio] is not the same as supporting cinema, that liking an Instagram post is not the same as sustaining an artistic practice.
What would it mean to actually love the artist rather than the system? It would mean buying directly when possible. 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 following 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 on culture.
Barrington, characteristically, 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 lands 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 the terrain, and then you look for the opening. Because there is always an opening. The 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 the 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 recommended by a machine. The system does not need this kind of attention. The system scales beautifully without it. The artist does not scale. The artist is irreducibly singular, which is, of course, the whole point.
Alvaro Barrington, standing in his London studio at some hour of the night, his leather sofa covered in unidentified fabrics, 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 extravagant way we have learned to love the system.
(This is part 1 of 3. Part Two: They Will Tell You the Well Is Dry While They Are Swimming in It - publishes next week. Subscribe to the newsletter so you don't miss it, or if you are the kind of person who ignores newsletters, set a calendar reminder now.)
