Neoformalist motivation

I personally found the idea of motivation in film to be one of the most interesting in Thompson’s article. I never really think about what categories motivate the inclusion of different devices and objects within a film. I think I can recognize compositional, realistic and trans textual motivations. I am struggling with the idea and concept of artistic motivation. It seems to be an almost over arching category that all the other theories can fit into, as all decisions are made for artistic purposes in film. The paradox is you can only see it when all the other obvious motivations are not present. I personally think to find artistic motivation would be the most difficult for me in any film. This is also puzzling to me because it makes it seem as though the artist motivates all formal element choices.  This does not account for other elements that may have happened by accident.