For over 20 years until a few days ago, Kelly Clarkson, the pop star, former talk show host and first and best American idol winner, was more or less considered a national treasure. Now, in a story that has dominated celebrity news all week, a Brooklyn gift shop called Art of Play is accusing Clarkson of putting its staff and neighbors “at risk.” Who could have predicted that the young woman who performed “A Moment Like This” at Idol the finale all those years ago would one day be mixed with a moment like Thisinvolving the online outrage machine and a $15,000 animatronic bird? Certainly not me.
We are now entering day five of the Clarkson-Art of Play case, and there are a few facts that both sides seem to agree on. Neither side disputes that on Saturday afternoon, Clarkson went to the Brooklyn Heights store. Neither party disputes that, during her visit, Clarkson inquired about the aforementioned expensive animatronic bird that was on display in the store. Beyond that, the two stories diverge. Clarkson shared his version of events online shortly after the visit:
According to Clarkson, she “drove to Brooklyn” because she wanted to visit a store that she “thought was really cool.” She “had a few things in mind to buy and was literally looked at like I couldn’t afford it and told he could find something comparable for me,” she wrote. “Wow, man. You’re an idiot and you just lost a huge sale. But you should all go see Art of Play in Brooklyn if you like being treated like Julia Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman.”
The store later posted its own version of the story on Instagram, where it said Clarkson had asked about “a one-of-a-kind singing and dancing bird automaton” named Molly, which it said was attached to the store’s wall and was not for sale. Incredibly, Clarkson fought back, pointing out that the item had a price tag that said $15,000 next to it, and that when she asked about it, a store employee “looked at her in the elevator” and told her in a “condescending” tone that he could find something comparable for her.
From there, a predictable series of events occurred: The company’s social media accounts received a wave of negative comments, and people began showing up in person to harass the store’s employees and customers. One of the owners of Art of Play, Adam Rubin, who is also, by the way, the author of the bestselling children’s book Dragons love tacosbegan speaking to the media about the negative impact of Clarkson’s posts, and he didn’t mince his words: “Kelly Clarkson put us in danger,” he told New York magazine and other media outlets. “People are being threatened in the streets. … They’re calling. They’re sending emails. They’re leaving reviews on every platform, they’re review-bombing, they’re attacking anyone who mentions us on social media.” He called the whole situation a “foolish misunderstanding,” but he could have just let it go. “You know, everyone has a bad day. But things changed when she used her platform to attack us. It’s an asymmetrical social war.” Was he being a little dramatic? Of course. “Asymmetrical social warfare” is quite a phrase from the owner of a magic-themed store in Brooklyn. But he’s also more or less right: There may be some justifiable reasons for a celebrity to attack a small business on social media, but Clarkson had no good cause to fall back on.
Christopher Cann/USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
Things could have ended there… if security footage of the incident hadn’t surfaced. Investigative journalist Pablo Torre obtained the footage and shared it on his podcast Tuesday evening. The footage has no sound, so we’ll never know what really happened, but Torre used it as an argument to argue that Clarkson was the one who was most at fault: She was only in the store for a few minutes and had only brief interactions with its employees. its exit. Footage of her leaving the store shows she took out her phone almost immediately. The tweet that started all of this was posted about 15 minutes later.
Here’s what I think happened: Clarkson had a confusing interaction with a salesperson because she asked him about an item that had a price tag on it that she was told wasn’t for sale for reasons she didn’t understand. She interpreted this as being about her and either took some sort of special offense as a celebrity, or had some sort of flashback to her working-class roots in Texas, or both. (It’s worth noting that she looked exactly like every other customer in the store that day, based on the pictures, but whatever.) Meanwhile, Art of Play seemed to have a bizarre policy of displaying an item that it hadn’t really decided whether it sold or not. I visited the store myself to get a feel for the scene, and it absolutely seemed like an item one could buy, even though it was passive-aggressively priced to $15 million, which may still not be a deal-breaker for Clarkson, who, according to online estimates, has a net worth in excess of $50 million.
Should Clarkson have tweeted about this? Absolutely not, ever, but certainly not in 2026, when we’ve spent the last 10-15 years learning about the corrosive effects of social media on virtually every situation. Everyone likes to joke that you shouldn’t compete against Clarkson in a singing competition expecting to win, but it goes without saying that you shouldn’t compete against someone who has 8 million followers. It appears that this truly was a misunderstanding, largely due to Art of Play’s confusing decisions, but even if that wasn’t the case and they were truly wrong, what good could it do if it attacked a small business? Art of Play is not, as Torre pointed out, an airline with a full customer service department to monitor its endorsements. It’s a store whose customer base includes many children and their parents who would probably prefer their faces not appear in social media videos, which could lead to them being doxxed.
Clarkson’s outrage at being treated like someone who can’t afford a $15,000 bird is also pretty wild: If you have enough money to get angry at being perceived as poorer than you are, you’re way ahead of most people. Most of us aren’t upset that we can’t afford $15,000 birds, but we wonder why so much of our society seems to gravitate toward people who can.
These are my quick verdicts: Clarkson guilty, Art of Play just boring. And now we’re wondering why it all blew up so much. Clarkson’s original tweet was viewed 46.2 million times. That’s more than the population of many countries. The controversy made The view, Hello Americaand the New York Times. Torre, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, took it upon himself to investigate. In all likelihood he was doing it partly because it was stupid, sort of like a joke, but nonetheless: why are we all talking about this? The simplest explanation is that it’s very, very funny. Do we crave viral, low-stakes, COVID-conscious, lesbian bar-style dramas to distract us from all the ways the world feels immutably bad? Yes, but I guess we have to remember that what’s low stakes for us is still high stakes for us. someoneeven if that person is a pretentious magic store owner or a furious pop star for not being able to purchase an exorbitant product. bird.
