The question of authorship in music video, if asked at all, has tended to be posed either around the figure of the director as the controlling creative hand who stands behind the work or else around the figure of the performer as the artistic centre within the work. The first of these strategies for attributing authorship can be seen as an attempt to simply transplant the figure of the film auteur, which is itself really only a reworked version of the romantic definition of the artist, into the field of music video. In other words, following the dominant model of auteurism sketched out in Film Studies, certain directors are identified as highly individual artists who infuse their work with their own unique thematic concerns, personal vision and stylistic traits. Moreover, in arguing for the director-as-auteur one is also arguing for a fundamentally evaluative critical approach to the study of music video, an approach which not only distinguishes between those videos deemed as art and those dismissed as not art or non-art, but also one which seeks to discuss and adjudicate on the relative artistic merits of both the video and its director. The benefit of this strategy is, of course, that it redeploys familiar arguments about art and artistic worth to claim legitimacy and cultural value for what is generally taken to be a crude commercial form of popular culture.