Basically catching the big fish refers to lynchs approach to meditation and art(edited) he meditates daily in order to get his mind in the right place in order to "catch ideas" and he wants bigger and better ideas that come from a deeper place, unconcious or whatever and he determines how best to translate them into reality movies, statues, furniture, paintings, music, etc
at this point i'm guessing you can see where i'm going with this
his way isn't just "one way" of approaching art to me, it's literally the core concept of what art actually is (though insofar as how he goes about it he probably is somewhat idiosyncratic) All art is is the translation of ideas (maybe many, maybe a few, maybe a big one, maybe a group of peoples ideas) to some physical manifestation You can't avoid that core
its pretty all encompassing in that state but you can hone it down somewhat with "that communicates an idea" and maybe "in a non direct form"
or that which can't just be stated outright with plain words
this gets to why someone like lynch detests trying to explain things in his movies as well
it'd be exactly the same as me trying to just state to you an idea for some artistic work that is still in my head
theres no difference to doing it before or after you take away from the experience of a work
i'd go so far as to say that this whole conception actually also means that even if you say, invented a brain-to-brain interface you still wouldn't have the ability to transmit "art" to one another
cause its the culmination of many many many thoughts honing down a work to its final form
to take it in another direction you could also look at so called "bad" art and see it plainly, a poorly communicated idea
or perhaps one of very little idea beyond "i'm having fun splattering paint on this canvas"
i think its worth saying there isn't a need to see what the artists ideas were in creating a work
just that the work can't exist without the infusion of ideas into a physical medium at all
you could also take it in the direction of art-by-comittee which would be somewhat of an oxymoron
but that is a bunch of people's ideas jockeying for space in a single work, perhaps hacking off the bits and pieces and flavor that any one of them would have been able to communicate had it been the work of a more singular vision
anyway thats essentially the rough draft of my current thoughts on art as a whole
For me i like the weird, offbeat, and unique. I think one reason I am drawn to odd (but realized) artsyles is that they are indicators that the creation itself was driven by the creator, something of an actual internal vision, rather than taking cues from other people on how something ought to look/play/feel. A derivative artstyle isn't a killer red flag in itself, but a standout art style indicates vision. Of course a style that was once standout can become derivative if it is adopted in order to fit the bullet point of "i want a unique artstyle lemme just crib mike mignola" (though i admit ive purchased plenty of things that just crib mike mignola or other influences of my own)