The By-Product
The object of painting a picture is not to make a picture—however unreasonable this may sound. The picture, if a picture results, is a by-product and may be useful, valuable, interesting as a sign of what has past. The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence.
, The Art Spirit (1923)
What if we’ve been asking the wrong question all along?
When anxieties rise about machines generating images, text, music—the fear often centers on the products: will they be indistinguishable from human-made work? Will there still be a market for what we make? Will our outputs matter?
Henri redirects attention elsewhere. “The object of painting a picture is not to make a picture.” The finished work, he suggests, is almost incidental—“a by-product” of something more essential. What matters is “the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence.”
This reframes everything. If creative work is primarily about entering a particular quality of attention, a mode of heightened aliveness, then the question isn’t whether machines can produce similar objects. It’s whether we, in making, experience what Henri calls “a more than ordinary moment of existence.” The painting (or poem, or song) becomes evidence—“a sign of what has past”—rather than the purpose itself.
There’s something both liberating and unsettling here. Liberating because it suggests our worth doesn’t rest on producing things no algorithm could approximate. Unsettling because it demands honesty: how often do we actually experience that state Henri describes? How often is our making a genuine means of arriving somewhere, rather than simply generating output? The question that lingers is not what tools we use, but what happens inside us while we’re using them—and whether we’d notice if that inner dimension went missing.