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For the past 20-plus years right up 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 regarded as 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 “in danger.” Who could have predicted that the young woman who performed “A Moment Like This” on the Idol finale all those years ago would one day be embroiled in a moment like this, involving the online outrage machine and a $15,000 animatronic bird? Definitely not me.
We are now moving into Day Five of the Clarkson–Art of Play affair, and there are a few facts that both sides seem to agree on. Neither party disputes that on Saturday afternoon, Clarkson visited the Brooklyn Heights shop. Nor does either party dispute that, during her visit, Clarkson inquired about the aforementioned pricey animatronic bird that was on display in the shop. Beyond that, the two accounts diverge. Clarkson shared her version of events online shortly after the visit:
Video from Slate
According to Clarkson, she “drove all the way to Brooklyn” because she wanted to check out a store that she “thought looked really rad.” She “had a few things in mind to buy and literally was looked at as if I couldn’t afford it and was told he could find something comparable for me,” she wrote. “Wow, dude. You’re an idiot and just lost a huge sale. But y’all should go check out Art of Play in Brooklyn if you enjoy being treated like Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman.”
The store followed up by posting its own version of the story on Instagram, where it said that 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 volleyed 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 “elevator eyed” her and told her in a “condescending” tone that he could find something comparable for her.
From there, a series of predictable events unfurled: The business’s social media accounts received a groundswell of negative comments, and people started showing up in person to harass employees and customers at the shop. One of Art of Play’s owners, Adam Rubin, who is also, incidentally, the author of the bestselling children’s book Dragons Love Tacos, started speaking to the media about the negative impact of Clarkson’s posts, and he did not mince words: “Kelly Clarkson put us in danger,” he told New York magazine and other outlets. “People are getting threatened on the street. … They’re calling. They’re emailing. 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 “an insane misunderstanding,” but one he could have let go. “You know, everybody has a bad day. But things changed when she used her platform to attack us. It’s asymmetrical social warfare.” Was he being a tad bit dramatic? Sure. “Aymmetrical social warfare” is quite the phrase from the owner of a twee magic-themed store in Brooklyn. But he is also more or less right—there are perhaps a few justifiable reasons for a celebrity to attack a small business on social media, but Clarkson had no righteous cause to stand on.
Things might have ended there … if the security footage from the incident didn’t emerge. Investigative journalist Pablo Torre obtained the footage and shared it on his podcast Tuesday evening. The footage doesn’t have sound, so we’ll never know what truly happened, but Torre used it as grist to make the point that Clarkson was the one who was more at fault: She was only in the store for a few minutes, and only had brief interactions with its employees—it looks like she did indeed ask an employee about Molly, and after she seemed not to like his answer, she left, saying something else, likely a complaint about her interaction with the first employee, to a different employee at the cash register near the front of the store on her way out. Footage of her leaving the store shows she whipped out her phone almost immediately. The tweet that kicked all this off went up about 15 minutes later.
Here’s what I think happened: Clarkson had a confusing interaction with a salesperson, because she asked 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 to be about her, and either took some kind of special umbrage as a celebrity or had some kind of flashback to her working-class roots in Texas or both. (It’s worth noting that she looked exactly like all the other patrons in the store that day, according to the footage, but whatever.) Meanwhile, Art of Play seemed to have a bizarre policy of displaying an item that it hadn’t really decided whether it was selling or not. I visited the store myself to get a sense of the scene, and it absolutely seemed like an item one could buy, though its price tag has passive-aggressively been changed to $15 million, which actually still might not be an impediment for Clarkson, who according to online estimates has a net worth exceeding $50 million.
Should Clarkson have fired off a tweet about this? Absolutely not, not ever, but certainly not in the year 2026, when we’ve spent the past 10 to 15 years learning about the corrosive effects social media has on basically every situation. Everyone likes to joke about how you don’t go up against Clarkson in a singing competition and expect to win, but it goes without saying that you shouldn’t face off against anyone with 8 million followers. It seems like it was genuinely a misunderstanding, owing in no small part to Art of Play’s own confusing decisions, but even if it weren’t and they were really in the wrong, what good could come of her attacking a small business? Art of Play is not, as Torre pointed out, an airline with an entire customer service department to monitor its mentions. It’s a store whose clientele includes a lot of children and their parents who would probably prefer if their faces didn’t appear in social media videos that could lead to them being doxed.
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 mad about being perceived as poorer than you are, you’re way ahead of most people. Most of us aren’t mad that we can’t afford $15,000 birds, but we do wonder why so much of our society seems to be oriented around people who can.
Those are my rapid-fire verdicts: Clarkson guilty, Art of Play merely annoying. And now we are left to wonder why this whole thing blew up as much as it did. Clarkson’s original tweet has been viewed 46.2 million times. That’s more than the population of many countries. The controversy made The View, Good Morning America, and the New York Times. Torre, who is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, took it upon himself to investigate. In all likelihood, he was doing so partly because of how silly it was, sort of as a lark, but nevertheless: Why are we all talking about this? The simplest explanation is that it’s very, very funny. Do we long for low-stakes, viral COVID-conscious lesbian bar–style drama to distract us from all the ways the world feels immovably bad? Yes, but I suppose we have to remember that what’s low stakes to us is always high stakes to someone, even if that someone happens to be a pretentious magic-shop owner or a pop star fuming about not getting to buy an exorbitantly expensive bird.