According to Frederic Jameson, "architecture is one of the few remaining arts in which the great auteurs still exist" [thanks meltingobject]. Is this true?

To dig it, we've got to understand "auteur" as not just somebody who makes something, or someone who commandeers the forces of others to make something, but as someone who an institution recognizes as an individual with a unique signature and trusts with resources as such. Viz.: Orson Welles gets the funds and the props of RKO to play with, and more than once.

Jameson might be right, in an era where even big-name movie directors are no longer trusted to lend their stamp to things—even if the likes of Sam Raimi can be called in for a big-budget studio movie. Raimi is used for his name and, perhaps, for his skill, or for his familiarity with a certain idiom and demographic, but not for auteurship, not for his running roughsod over the confines of convention.

Where do we see auteurs these days, then? In architecture, perhaps (witness Frank Gehry and Koolhaas), and in book publishing (Rowling)—though in publishing the auteur is not given a team of skilled lackeys to do his or her bidding. Where else? Music? Maybe. Technology? Maybe. Daily online writing? Certainly.

This answers a looming question, I think, about so-called "corporate blogging." The question is whether weblogs will be a useful tool for business development, and also whether they'll be a force for positive change in that context: giving better voice to opinion and criticism from the rank-and-file, for example, or leading to more transparency from the higher-ups, or just allowing ideas to flow and conversations to develop more quickly, leading to better collaboration.

The Happy Tutor argues that blogging in a corporate context would get bogged down in commitees, marketing double-think, and PR-correct language. Quite possibly so. But I find it interesting that, at no less a behemoth than Microsoft, Scoble and others are writing interestingly about matters related to their job and in a more-or-less personal voice which is not completely eclipsed by PR jism. We'll never see microsoft.blogspot.com where company PR experts make anonymous posts—or if we did it would lack everything that's interesting about a weblog. But maybe keeping a weblog will become a natural and uncensored (such as it might be) mode of communication, where corporate employees usefully discuss and criticize ideas in connection with their jobs; good critical thinkers (who believe in—or submit to—the mission) are an asset for any enterprise, corporate or not, and corporations have long hired people explicitly for that reason. Exposing some of their dialogue to the outside world doesn't appear to be entirely harmful, as in the case of Scoble; in fact it seems to stir up interest and anticipation. If employees of the future are encouraged to keep two weblogs—an extrablog and an intrablog—so that they can avoid revealing trade secrets, we might see an information flow in corporations that's slightly less hierarchical.

Of course, whether we see an equitable distribution of profits, or a richer sense of what the "bottom line" ought to involve. . . are totally different questions.