Some things are more-fundamental:

the artist was expressing something that many know/understand/mean, & they were just the renderer of that meaning, in a recognizable way.

there’s a poem by Robert Frost which many people automatically recognize as him having experience induced understanding of depression.

many insist that that’s just projection, baseless…

but the problem is that if people who’ve experienced depression recognize that that-rendition honestly-does represent it well, & that is consistent, then the deniers are maintaining that there is “no basis” for that correlation.

Sometime’s it’s simply skill-of-artist: there was a writer who wrote about abused-children, & everybody who’d experienced it concluded that the author, too, had been abused, but that was mere-skill, & he found it frustrating that people woudn’t accept that…

but either can be.

Representing a meaning can be of-one’s-self, XOR can be of-one’s-skill, without any deep inner-recognition or experience-induced-meaning/understanding.

So, to the degree that meaning can stand on its own, yes, art can be separated from the artist.

But to the degree that art can’t stand on its own, because it is only expression-of-skill, or expression-of-someone/inner-meaning, it can’t.

& THAT is a spectrum, which different works occupy different locations on.

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