In case you haven’t heard about TED, let me break it down for you: what started out as a “small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading” has turned into a highly Googled, highly popular website that features tons of speakers taking art and ideas to new levels. Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame, recently took over the internet with her words about nurturing creativity, and I must have gotten at least 8 emails gushing about how awesome it was and how I had to check out it RIGHT NOW. An excerpt:

And that search [about creativity] has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons…So brilliant — there it is, right there that distance that I’m talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work.

I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

Beautiful and eloquent, right?  Sure.  So people applauded and forwarded the video to their friends and got all starry-eyed about the idea that creativity is mysterious and spiritual.

But then, Sarah Silverman was invited to speak to a TED audience.  The comedienne, known for her completely un-PC mouth and bold sense of morality, decided to spend a majority of her TED time targeting the recent backlash over the word “retarded” (by dropping it as much as possible)  and people freaked.  Here’s a third-party excerpt:

I want to adopt a special needs child (to which one person applauded), because adopting a special needs child, who would do that? Only an awesome person, right?

The only problem with adopting a retarded child is that the retarded child, when you are 80 is well, still retarded and that [I] wouldn’t enjoy the freedoms of setting them free at age 18, so [I'm] only going to adopt a retarded child with a terminal illness so it has an expiration date, because who would adopt a retarded child with a terminal illness? Well, someone who was awesome like [me].

Even though Silverman was out to shock and make jokes, to many people listening, it was clear that she was targeting specific issues of free speech and overblown politics.  To her, creativity was making people laugh at one of the most un-PC subjects ever: a terminally ill mentally challenged kid.

So why did TED decide her ideas weren’t really “worth spreading”?  Was it because her creativity is more sarcastic and curse-laden than Elizabeth Gilbert’s? Or was it because, to some TED organizers, her creativity simply…wasn’t?

The age-old question of is that Art?! has been rearing its complicated, unanswerable head since people started to draw on cave walls, and Silverman’s mutiny of TED’s slightly stuffy stage is just another example.  While TED Organizer Chris Anderson tweeted that her performance was “god-awful,” other people thought she was f%&cking hilarious.  So who’s right?

Even though I don’t find her as funny as a lot of people, I have to side with Silverman here.  If you invite this girl to speak, you know she’s going to be relentlessly herself.  She’s not going to compromise her creativity to fit the needs or opinions of anyone else.  If the TED organizers had done any research at all, they would have known this.  Art insults people every day.  Just because I walk into the Met and feel like my 5-year-old niece could paint the same priceless paintings that hang on the wall in the modern art wing doesn’t mean anything other than that white canvas with a white dot doesn’t appeal to me.

Gilbert’s creativity was beautiful and spiritual.  Silverman’s was crass and uncomfortable.  But when it comes to their importance, they’re equal.