Paul Rudd was photographed outside Art of Play in Brooklyn on Oct. 21, standing on the sidewalk in a black hoodie and green-rimmed glasses as he looked through the window for a few seconds. The Ant-Man actor did not go inside. He turned and kept walking. The shop at 69 Atlantic Avenue had already been in the news for nearly two weeks because of Kelly Clarkson and a mechanical bird named Molly.
Clarkson visited the curiosity shop on Oct. 10 with her children. She wore a yellow T-shirt, a baseball cap and a backpack. Security footage later obtained by the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out shows her inside for less than five minutes, from roughly 2:49 p.m. to 2:54 p.m. She browsed, stopped in front of Molly and spoke with a male employee while pointing at the bird and the tag beside it. She put her items back, headed toward the exit and then turned to speak with the person at the register before leaving.
That afternoon she posted on X. “Just drove all the way to Brooklyn to check out this store I thought looked really rad and 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. She called the employee an idiot who had “just lost a huge sale” and told followers to visit Art of Play “if you enjoy being treated like Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman.”
In a follow-up she shared a photo of a $15,000 tag next to the bird and said the employee had looked her up and down before telling her the item was for sale but that he could find something comparable. She called the store rude and a liar.
Co-owner Adam Rubin gave a different account. He said Molly, a handcrafted singing automaton made by Seattle artist Bliss Kolb, is permanently attached to the wall and used during the shop’s magic shows, so she was never for sale. The $15,000 figure, he said, referred to the cost of commissioning a nearly identical version from Kolb. Staff also offered to show Clarkson a different German-made singing bird priced at about $2,000 that she could have taken home that day. She left before seeing it. Rubin called the situation an insane misunderstanding and said the singer was treated like any other customer. He added that nothing that happened inside the shop justified the public attack, though everyone has a bad day.
The store later said it reached out to Clarkson through multiple channels and that she is welcome back anytime. Rubin also said the posts led to hate mail and threats against staff. At the same time, foot traffic increased as people came to see Molly. The shop raised the displayed price from $15,000 to $15 million and put up a sign calling her “the world’s most famous singing bird automata.” Rubin said the change was due to popular demand. He later said that if someone paid the new price, every employee would receive $15,000, Kolb would get $1 million and the rest would go toward more antique automatons. Kolb told the Wall Street Journal he had received roughly 100 commission inquiries since the posts went up.
Rudd’s brief stop outside the shop on Oct. 21 did not include any public comment from the actor. Photos shot by Backgrid and shared by DeuxMoi showed him looking in for a moment and then leaving. The images spread online with the usual jokes about curiosity. The bird remains on the wall with the $15 million tag. Clarkson and the store still disagree on what was said during those five minutes. The footage confirms the length of the visit and the conversations. It does not include audio.
