NC State freshman Zamareya Jones builds retro Lego radio on Sweet 16 flight. Where to buy
NC State freshman Zamareya Jones builds retro Lego radio on Sweet 16 flight. Where to buy
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Women's basketball players you must watch in March Madness
Mackenzie Salmon and Meghan Hall give a few players to keep your eye on in the women's March Madness tournament that are not named Paige Bueckers.
Sports Seriously
Basketball and LEGOs share a special connection, and NC State's Zamareya Jones has discovered the ideal balance between orchestrating plays on the basketball court and assembling the perfect build.
The freshman guard from Greenville, North Carolina, started the hobby last summer with a Jeep set. Once the final piece was placed, her passion for building was sparked. Now, Jones has a growing collection of builds, including Mario, Spider-Man, Pac-Man, and the beloved Experiment 626 Stitch.
FOLLOW THE MADNESS NCAA women's basketball scores, schedules, teams and more.
Let's not forget why Jones landed on the ACC newcomer watch list—she can hoop. The former McDonald's All-American has averaged 6.9 points, 1.5 rebounds, and 1.5 assists coming off the bench. The freshman posted a career-high 18 points in a dominant 72-42 win over Louisville.
On the journey to the NCAA women's tournament game between No. 2 NC State and No. 3 LSU, Jones was on the team plane organizing her next build: a retro radio.
Whether you're a seasoned builder or a novice eager to create, the retro radio is available for purchase on Lego.com, Target or Amazon.
Buy retro radio on Lego.com
Buy retro radio at Target
Buy retro radio on Amazon
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In 2021, for example, the Brooklyn arts collective Mschf purchased a $20,000 Andy Warhol print and then built a machine to make 999 forgeries. The group's so-called Museum of Forgeries then sold all 1,000 prints to the public, with no way for buyers to know whether they were buying a fine art "original" or a " worthless copy." There was a world of difference between the two, yet none was discernable. The group wanted to create a form of "provenance destruction," Kevin Wiesner, Mschf's co-chief creative officer, tells me, adding: "You should basically have no trust in anyone or any gallery that would try to claim it had the original of this Andy Warhol drawing." For Mschf, copying is a way to democratize art and make it more accessible. Still, he sees a real tension between artistic copying and the law, with the law slow to failing to keep up. 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For me, having the piece on my wall feels like a bargain, but it raises a fundamental question about how we value art in the age of mass reproduction. If I took this piece to an auction house tomorrow, it'd be worth precisely $0. The real piece, which most collectors couldn't distinguish from mine, would sell for a tiny fortune. They're the same blocks, the same patterns, identical to the pixel, yet the valuation varies so radically. This is also my strongest legal defense for why this copy was fair use. Weinberg says: "Is anyone in the market for an Ai Weiwei Lego portrait going to buy yours instead? I think the answer is pretty clearly not. They are buying the piece because Ai Weiwei made it." It wasn't until I hung my impostor piece in my home office that I realized how it echoed so many of the same questions that Ai has raised in his work about the valuation of art. Ai came to prominence, in part, because of his work with "priceless" Chinese antiquities, painting one with a Coca-Cola logo, covering others in bright household paints, and simply smashing one 2,000-year-old urn on the ground. He has claimed art is "powerful only because someone thinks it's powerful and invests value in the object." While there's no world that I think my dinky Lego work lands within a million miles of Ai's work, there's a single thread of connection between them all: Why do we value what we value? Erin L. Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College of the City University of New York system, tells me that it's never a simple question of which copying is illegal, because copying is how people learn. Instead, the legality of copying is a question of intent, she says, and "the exact same object" can be "entirely innocent in one context and then not in another." The knockoff purse that's a crime to sell online is an indispensable teaching tool in a fashion design course. The person I was most eager to ask this question to was the artist himself, and I was shocked when Ai Weiwei was generous enough to respond. To him, "all copying and imitation are neither beneficial nor harmful; they are simply one person's response to another," he tells me over email. "If an imitation does not add new meaning — whether by challenging or advancing the original concept of the artwork — then such imitation is, in effect, no imitation at all." Authenticity isn't just at the heart of art world valuation; it's become increasingly inescapable in much of the consumer goods landscape. It's everything from the dupe Birkin bag you see on the subway to the store-brand toothpaste we buy at the pharmacy. As it becomes easier and faster to copy more and more of the physical items that build multibillion-dollar brands, how much will those brands be worth? For many younger consumers, knockoffs are no longer shameful, but actually cool. According reporting from The Guardian, half of US consumers buy dupes for the savings, but nearly one in five just do even when cost isn't a barrier to the real thing. A social-media-fueled surge in imitation products — from Lululemon leggings to Bottega Veneta bags — has transformed what was once an act of economic desperation into a mark of savviness. "I think certain kids, maybe younger kids, don't care that much about if it's real or not," says Lukas Bentel, Mschf's chief creative officer. "They care about the image." Part of the reason for so much copying in fashion, in particular, is that the laws are surprisingly lax. No matter how much fashion brands may spend promoting high-end designs, beyond protecting their trademarks and logos, there's little they can do to prohibit a copycat. At the end of the day, when asked whether it's worth paying more for the "real" version, the "original" version, more consumers are resoundingly saying no. Maybe none of you reading this piece will ever end up hanging a forged artwork on your walls, but more and more of you will likely wear clothes, carry accessories, and buy home goods that aren't exactly the real thing. And as ever more forms of copying become quicker, easier, and cheaper, the army of dupes will only grow. But whether you value those items any less than the originals, that's up to you. My final question to Ai was what he thought of this whole enterprise, the copied art and this article. Sadly, my first review as an artist was hardly stellar. "On the surface, this stunt appears to be an act of non-action," he told me. "It is simply a personal journey undertaken in search of someone truly worth imitating. For me, this work holds little meaning."
