What started me down this path was a profile of the artist Jeff Koons in the March issue of Vanity Fair , which included a picture of Koons in his studio. Then came the news of the difficult contract negotiations in Hollywood between the Writers Guild and the movie studios. But starting in the late nineteenth and certainly in the twentieth century, the mythic modern artist was supposed to be a solitary genius like van Gogh or Jackson Pollack, an individual and his materials, alone in the studio. It makes for an easier, better narrative to focus on a single, struggling hero, rather than a group. And if Jeff Koons wants to employ people to fabricate his art, fine.
Authorship needs to mean something.
And I think there's a test that can work in any medium. If the answers are closer to yes than no, then you're probably looking at the work of a bona fide author. And if not, well, everybody's gotta eat. But not everybody gets to be called an auteur. Kurt Andersen is the host of WNYC's Studio 360.