thought

art as a crystalization of thought.

"Catching the Big Fish" refers to David Lynch's approach to meditation and art. He meditates daily in order to get his mind in the right place, empty. He isn't searching for anything during these sessions, he's doing it to develop a blank mind. He does this, in much the same sense of "muses" in order to "catch ideas". He wants bigger and better ideas that come from a deeper place, the unconcious, and he the determines how best to translate them into reality movies, statues, furniture, paintings, music, etc etc.

Art as crystallized thought

At this point i'm guessing you can see where i'm going with this

His way, taken whole-process, 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. It is impossible to avoid that core, even when attempting to.

Its pretty all encompassing in this state, but you can hone it down somewhat with "that communicates an idea" and maybe "in a non direct form". That which can't just be stated outright with plain words.

I think this gets to why someone like lynch detests trying to explain things in his movies as well. A movie, an art object is something fully formed that contains something ineffable. To try and just express all the shades of emotion and thought that went into such a thing is to completely detract from the work. 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. Maybe mildly interesting, worth a little nudge of excitement, but otherwise listless and dull.

Theres no difference to attempting to explain something like that before or after the creation. You take away from the experience of a work. You as an artist are trying to pull an entire experience out of yourself and create something that gives some form of experience to another.

I'd go so far as to say that this whole conception, this piling-on of ideas over time to form an external object. This actually also means that even if you invented a brain-to-brain interface you still wouldn't have the ability to transmit "art" to one another Its the culmination of many many many thoughts honing down a work to its final form.

To take this concept in another direction, you could also look at so called "bad" art and see it plainly, a poorly crysallized idea, notion, or whatever you want to call it.

While I am someone who apprecaites conceptual art, many do not go much further than "I'm having fun splattering paint on this canvas because I saw some other famous guy do it."

I think its worth saying there isn't a need to see what the artist's specific ideas were in creating a work. It is just that the work can't exist without the infusion of ideas into a physical medium at all

This can be take in the direction of art-by-comittee, which would be somewhat of an oxymoron. It is very easy to see that this sort of thing would naturally lack a vision. 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.

Essentially, this forms the rough draft of my current thoughts on art as a whole.

For myself, 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 (insert unique artist here)" (though I admit I've purchased plenty of things that just crib from artists I like anyways)