The world refuses to separate the artist from the work: 50 % no against 21 % yes, with 29 % of voters having no opinion. The refusal camp reaches half the vote, but hesitation weighs more than the supportive camp.
The gender divide is striking and complete: men mostly vote for separation, women mostly against, with a notable share of undecided women on top. The two groups do not lean the same way.
Age is just as clear-cut: the 25-34s, the 45-54s and the 13-17s unanimously reject separation, while the 55-64s accept it entirely. The over-65s refuse to take a position at all, and the 18-24s form the most scattered bracket, split across all three answers.
The debate is better furnished than the vote would suggest, and it quickly turns into dialogue. The refusal camp holds two distinct arguments. The first is aesthetic: art comes from within the artist and necessarily carries something of them. The second is moral and practical: consuming the work means funding its author and risking to launder them through sympathy.
The victims' argument returns as the central friction point: separating would amount to minimising acts that are often serious and punished by law. One voice concedes that separation would hold in an ideal world, but not in this one, where art is also a tool of influence and income.
The supportive camp does not dispute that; it shifts the reasoning towards the work's autonomy: once created, it is interpreted by millions of people who find meanings in it sometimes opposed to the author's, and that life beyond them gives it an existence of its own.
The thread ends on a reformulation both camps seem to accept: the real question would not be « can we » separate, but « in what circumstances is it acceptable to do so ». The request for concrete examples goes unanswered. That is where the debate stopped.