I think there are two main ways to create art.
One is building the castle: you assemble together parts and see how they match and build towards a finished project that is made of many mutually coherent parts. A perfect work made that way is a castle where every piece perfectly fits with every other piece.
The other is finding the monolith: you have a vision, and some notion that somewhere lies a perfect, canonical implementation of that vision, and you look for the work that would implement that vision up to its logical and canonical conclusion. A perfect work made that way is when you find the monolith that perfectly renders what the vision leads to.
You can use a mixture of both of course, but I believe you have to use at least one or the other.
That's it.