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. Behind him was a whole platoon of assistants - I counted 20 people - among them the workers who actually make the extravagant sculptures and paintings that are nominally "by" Jeff Koons.

Then came the news of the difficult contract negotiations in Hollywood between the Writers Guild and the movie studios. I happen to be a member of the Guild, and one of the big issues for screenwriters is the so-called "posessory credit" that more and more film directors are granted these days, almost automatically - you know, "A Film by Joe Blow" or "A Joe Blow Film."

"Joe Blow" is always the director.

And finally, last week, I attended a conference called "Designer as Author," put on by the School of Visual Arts in New York. The speakers and audience members were graphic designers who don't want simply to be hired guns, people who assemble other people's creative work - the work of photographers and illustrators and writers. The graphic designers crave the freedom and the power and the credit that goes to authors - and, for that matter, to film directors - who, like graphic designers, are mainly in the business of assembling the art and craft of other people.

So the designers and the screenwriters - people who work in collaborative creative enterprises - feel underappreciated compared, say, to someone like Jeff Koons - the brand-name star who sits atop his collaborative creative enterprise.

So who should be considered an author, an auteur, a creator?

There's nothing new about the atelier - the artist's workshop full of assistants who execute the master's ideas. The painter Peter Paul Rubens barely touched some of the "Rubenses" that came out of his atelier in the 17th century.

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. Individuals experience angst, but groups experience… bickering.

In other words, we are desperate to lionize individuals, which I think leads us to attribute all sorts of collaborative creative works to individual creators - whether it's a famous magazine editor getting all the credit for the work of her writers and photographers and designers, or a movie director getting exclusive credit for the work of his writers and cinematographers and designers.

Of course, some elite fraction of movie directors unquestionably are auteurs - people like Woody Allen who write as well as direct their films - and deserve the lion's share of the credit, or the blame. And if Jeff Koons wants to employ people to fabricate his art, fine. But let's dial back "auteur" so it isn't a synonym for "movie director."

Authorship needs to mean something. And I think there's a test that can work in any medium. Ask two questions of any artist and his art:

First, if he were required to create the work by himself, without the help of collaborators, could he do it?

And second, does she create things she'd happily read or watch or look at or listen to, even if she weren't being paid to do the work?

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.

I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.