Flipping The $15 Million Bird: Kelly Clarkson’s Asymmetric Social Warfare On Atlantic Avenue

“This isn’t about gossip, it’s about asymmetric social warfare,” a shopkeeper at Art of Play, in Brooklyn, tells me before going back to helping people play with various adult toys.

It’s Tuesday night at the “curiosity shop” on the border of Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, one block from a $39,500/year Montessori preschool that recently went viral for teachers’ Issey Miyake-inspired uniforms.

The store isn’t consistently mobbed, but every hour or so it’s briefly crowded with press. (I was there when a German influencer (?) started filming a video, waving around massive prop dollar bills.) Neighbors stop by to show solidarity (“I’ve always loved you guys” and “I think Kelly was out of line!”). Workers from the Afghan bakery around the corner come through with free baked goods in a pie box. The owners of Buzzy, a neighborhood cannabis dispensary, drop off some free weed stuff.

We are being “literally attacked,” a store manager tells a patron.

Let me tell you why I’m spending an otherwise normal Tuesday evening at Art of Play. Saturday, Kelly Clarkson, the Grammy-winning popstar and former talk show host, tweeted to her 8.8 million followers that the store treated her like she was poor. The store then explained, on Instagram, that Clarkson wanted to buy “Molly,” a “one-of-a-kind singing and dancing bird” that is “not for sale.” Clarkson countered with screenshots of a $15,000 price tag, alleging she was told by a shopkeeper, in a “condescending tone,” that the bird “is for sale but it costs $15,000, so if you’d like me to find something comparable for you, I can.”

Tuesday, co-owner Adam Rubin told TMZ the celebrity “used her platform to squash us like a bug”; he says they’ve received death threats and that neighbors have been doxxed. “Kelly Clarkson has put us in danger,” Rubin told New York Magazine.

When I was hanging out in the store near closing — just me, one of the co-owners (a professional magician, obviously), and a manager, Hal — I was told what happened Saturday, from their perspective.

Clarkson walked into the store wearing a hat, a backpack, a yellow shirt, and loose jeans. None of them recognized her. She browsed for a minute, picked up a $198 hand-stained glass “flower kaleidoscope” (I messed with it; it’s a pleasingly heavy flat brass kaleidosdope) and a $240 zoetrope. She walked over to Molly, the crank-operated bird, and asked to buy it, pointing to its $15,000 price tag; the interaction was “polite,” I’m told.

Regarding whether it was “for sale”: “It’s like going into a furniture store and asking to buy a couch,” Adam said. They don’t give you that couch; it’s for display only. The owners tried to explain this to Clarkson. They told her she could buy a $2,000 wooden bird, instead. They seemed confused by her outburst.

Now, the bird is for sale — for $15 million.

“We added a few zeros,” the manager says. “It’s a piece of art and has changed value.” (They want to capitalize on the attention.)

Wednesday, Adam gestures to the bird: “If some crypto bro comes in and wants to buy this,” he explains, he’ll sell it. (He’d probably sell it to Kelly, too. If she’ll buy it.) Then, he’ll give every employee $15,000, pay the bird’s craftsman $1 million, and build an elaborate glass display for mechanical toys — with a “NOT FOR SALE” sign on top.

A woman comes in and plays with toys for 30 minutes, then reveals herself to be a reporter from The New York Times; two of her coworkers walk in suddenly. They want the CCTV footage of Kelly Clarkson trying to buy the bird, but Adam has already given it to Pablo Torre Finds Out (a Times podcast). Adam is confused. Don’t you guys talk to each other? he asks the Times contingent, before explaining that he’s not doing any more press.

“The Daily Mail is trying to pay me off,” he says.

(Later, one of the New York Times boys becomes obsessed with solving a wood-and-metal game where you have to guide a ball up a ramp. He tries to win for at least an hour and fails.)

A People reporter walks in to take a picture of Molly. Store owners, who seem not to know who is press and who’s not, continue to redirect everyone’s attention to the toys. “Feel free to pick things up and play with them,” the owner keeps saying. (In between all this, I’m trying to solve a $198 Japanese wooden “egg” puzzle that supposedly cracks (?), and various employees come over whispering hints, like: pretend it’s a real egg.)

A customer asks the manager if he thinks SNL will cover the Kelly vs. Bird Store saga this weekend; sadly, Hal says, SNL is on a two-week break. He’s researched this.

But if they were filming? “Sarah Sherman would play Molly,” he says.

Several people ask if sales are up. “This is busy for a Wednesday!” Adam replies, every time. An employee accidentally refers to people in the store as “fans” and corrects himself: “customers.” Later, I’m told Art of Play’s magic shows, which take place Wednesday through Saturday nights in a “hidden theater” within the shop (employees keep popping out of a bookshelf; I think the theater is behind the bookshelf), are sold out through the end of October. Tickets are $200 for the front row and $125 for rows two, three, and four; the theater seats 26 people. So, Art of Play is making roughly $20,000 to $26,000 per week of sold out shows.

One of the identical twin magician co-owners — Dan and Dave Buck, 40-something blonde guys from NorCal who reportedly made over $2 million selling DVDs of magic tricks — tells me he traveled to Brooklyn specifically to monitor the store in the wake of the scandal.

“Our neighbors are scared,” Adam says. Apparently, someone wished terminal cancer on a neighbor’s cat, Enzo (as the neighbor reported on Substack).

An annoyingly loud ambulance goes by. Adam, hand in the air: “If Mamdani comes, the only thing I’m asking is for a noise ordinance like in Japan, where nothing above a certain decibel is permitted.” (Japan’s “Noise Regulation Act” limits sounds over 55 decibels in residential areas.)

Adam is carrying a mug, reading the children’s book he wrote, and sells, about a boy who invents a “special robot sauce” (it turns people into robots) to a TV reporter who buys it; a local walks in and buys a wooden Jeff Koons-esque balloon dog sculpture for ~$135.

But back to Molly: Where did this ~five-inch bird that costs as much as a private jet… come from? And why does the store care so much about… “her”?

Dave, one of the twin magicians, tells me he bought Molly 15 years ago; the automaton (reminder: crank-operated bird) holds particular significance for magicians like him. Harry Houdini, the father of magic, he tells me, took his name from an eighteenth-century French automaton maker named “Houdin.” Automatons and magic are intertwined, he says. But Art of Play employees don’t teach magic in the store, Dave explains, because “in a world where everyone has to know everything,” he says, people need “one last bastion” of wonder and mystery.

None of us know the exact nature of the dispute on Saturday. But it seems obvious some sort of culture clash went down: Kelly, a native Texan, dressed kind of homeless, did not take well to Brooklynites’ possibly condescending (?) and maybe completely unintended implication that she is poor. (Clarkson is worth at least $45 million.) Clarkson is America’s first Idol. She has a slight southern twang. She is heartland-coded, Americana-coded, post-9/11 coded. (In 2011 she was a Republican; she supported Ron Paul before voting for Obama.) The store, on the other hand, is in a neighborhood that swung ~71% for Mamdani. Shopkeepers were talking about turning this drama into “positive social change.” They sell wood and metal toys to some of the richest people in New York City. (Tuesday night, neighbors were gossipping about Dua Lipa moving in around the corner.)

The store says Clarkson is punching down, “squashing” a small business “like a bug.” Half the country thinks she’s punching up. Where you fall depends on your politics, i.e. your memeplex.

Right before I leave, after finally solving the Japanese egg thing (you whack it against your hand and it opens…), an employee of some sort walks in wearing a suit. The manager pulls him aside, explaining that he (the manager) intentionally dressed down so as not to (I’m paraphrasing) come across as an out-of-touch elite Brooklyn hipster. The implication is that maybe it would be better not to wear a suit to this store.

“Optics are important,” the manager says.

***

Harris Sockel is lead editor at Pirate Wires.

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