Legoland Florida plans to layoff 234 workers who are mostly performers
WINTER HAVEN, Fla. (AP) — Legoland Florida plans to lay off 234 workers, primarily performers, in an effort to be more competitive in central Florida's thriving theme park market, company officials said.
The theme park resort in Winter Haven, Florida, said in a notice to the state of Florida last Friday that the permanent layoffs would start at the end of March and last through the beginning of April.
Three quarters of the workers cited for layoffs were performers, and another fifth also was involved in the entertainment side of the theme park, according to the notice.
The theme park resort, whose workers are nonunion, has about 1,500 employees.
The theme park resort is owned by Merlin Entertainment. A Merlin spokeswoman didn't respond to an email inquiry on Wednesday. Julia Estrada, the company's public relations director for North America, said in a statement to other media outlets that the change would allow it to operate more flexibly in a competitive market.
'We will continue to have a core in-house entertainment offering, which we will scale up to meet our brand and guest experiences during the year,' Estrada said.
Besides the Lego-themed park, the resort has a Peppa Pig-themed park, a water park and a soon-to-open aquarium.
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Digital Trends
38 minutes ago
- Digital Trends
Lego Party's demo was so nice, I played it twice
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Qatar Living
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Events this Week – June 8
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Designed for families, enthusiasts, and school groups, the event features dedicated zones packed with hands-on building, a giant inflatable playground, and multiple stages hosting daily live shows and performances. Guests can also enjoy a cozy cinema zone screening four different LEGO® movies daily, then refuel at the Food Arena with a variety of delicious local and international bites. It's not just an event, it's a 10,000 sqm world of imagination, colour, building and adventure you don't want to miss! Date: June 7 - 22, 2025 Timings: 1 pm – 11 pm Location: QNCC Access: Tickets on Blippi's Garage Blippi is coming to Doha Festival City from June 8 to 14 for a week of fun, games, and learning! Kids can enjoy workshops and surprises at Blippi's Garage from 2:00 PM to 10:00 PM, with meet & greet sessions daily at 3:00, 5:00, 7:00, and 9:00 PM. Spend QAR 250 at any store and show your receipt at the entrance to get access for two kids. Don't miss the fun at Center Court! 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Business Insider
6 hours ago
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Lego my ego
If it weren't for the gallery assistant's haughty, dismissive tone, I probably would never have stolen the painting. To be clear, I'm not normally an art thief. My day jobs are as a civil rights lawyer and a law professor. Visual art is rarely my scene. So when my date invited me to see the Ai Weiwei exhibition in New York's Chelsea neighborhood this past winter, I wasn't exactly thrilled. But walking into the Vito Schnabel Gallery, I was enthralled by the artist's playful repurposing of — of all things — Lego blocks. The same plastic bricks that I'd used to make spaceships and castles on my childhood floor now hung up as high art, transformed into a neopointillistic reimagining of everything from Monet's "Water Lilies" to night-vision combat scenes. But it was the Warhol-esque quartet of self-portraits, with Ai's distinctive bearded silhouette reduced to four colors, that stunned me. They felt so human and so alien. I love that our brains are wired to find a clear face in such ambiguous masses of pixels. So I did something that you should never do in a New York art gallery: I asked the price. Art prices are the definition of irrationality. Quite literally, there's no inherent value, just what people are willing to pay. That's true to a degree for other goods, but rarely to this extreme. Stocks go up and down, but their price is often rooted in the expected performance of the company and other rational measures of future value. Currencies go up and down based on the fiscal prudence of their government's budgetary and monetary policy. But the art market is an ephemeral construction of hope and hype. A banana can be worth $6.2 million. A crude cartoon monkey can sell for $23 million one day and become virtually worthless the next. All that matters is what the buyer thinks. Maybe for buyers with billions in the bank, the gallery's prices were reasonable, rational. Maybe for those with art foundations and free-port tax schemes, this was a sound investment, especially from such a storied artist. I just didn't think the 30-by-30-inch sheet of Legos was worth 250,000 euros (maybe dollars are too pedestrian for art), no matter whose hand glued the blocks. Hearing the derision as the assistant named the price and added "plus tax," I felt like it was an "emperor has no clothes" moment. The picture was beautiful, but these were Lego bricks! I could spend the rest of my life in painting or sculpture classes and never be able to fabricate a Monet or recreate a Rodin. But Lego bricks? People say "my kid could make this" about so much modern art, dismissing the subtlety and nuance at the heart of so many works' beauty, but in the case of these toy bricks, I mean it literally. Seething from the assistant's condescension — his resentment at my gaucheness — I decided I would get even by using the one skill I've spent decades honing: the law. I, of course, wasn't going to swipe the art off the wall and spend between three and 15 years in prison. But what if I made a copy, not to sell (which could put me behind bars for five years for copyright infringement) but to comment on the absurdity of the inflated art market, and to question the very essence of what "authentic art" means? What if I copied the piece to write the article you're now reading, and it's the act of writing these words that helps prove the forgery was lawful? Through this legal alchemy, I could turn a crime into protected speech. I asked the gallery assistant whether it was OK to take a photo of the work. He said yes, probably thinking it was a consolation prize of sorts. In fact, it was just the first step. It took only a few minutes to crop the photo, look up the dimensions of the original, and print a full-size replica at a FedEx store. Then my online shopping spree began. For weeks, box after box of color-coded bulk Lego pieces would show up at my Brooklyn apartment. All told, it cost less than $250 (or 220 euros, for the non-Philistines). The thing I love about Lego-art forgery is that there's no guessing, no uncertainty. After I laid a transparent baseplate on top of the printout, the whole exercise simply became painting by numbers. Still, it took time. A 2 ½-foot Lego square includes 96 pieces per side, more than 9,200 pieces overall. It took weeks of trial and error to find the right colors and parts (or as close as I could get). Then I realized, infuriatingly, that for the work to hang without falling apart, I'd need to glue each piece in place, so I had to take it all apart and start again. I thought I could quickly Google what type of glue would hold the bricks best. Instead, I found myself lost down endless rabbitholes, reading diatribes from those who consider Lego Art a sin against the reusable plastic pieces and all they stood for. (Anti-glue folks: Please keep your powder dry before reading on.) Finally, last month, I picked it up from the framers: my one-of-a-kind forgery. You may think that copying Ai's work was wrong, or petty, or ridiculous. One thing you can't claim is that it's illegal. Building this work to comment on what I viewed as the farcical valuation of the original, and to educate my students and the public on copyright law is an act safeguarded by one of the cornerstones of free expression in the intellectual property age: fair use. "We often stand on the shoulders of others; we often need to copy in order to make our own points," Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, tells me. Fair use protects "uses that substantially benefit the public and that don't significantly harm copyright owners' incentives to create new works," she adds. In that way, my fake Ai Weiwei follows a long line of well-forged dissents. 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. Speaking about a Supreme Court decision in 2023 against Warhol's 1984 copying of a portrait of Prince, Wiesner expressed disbelief: "I can't believe that we're litigating this now about a silkscreen of a photograph of a person's face." Authenticity isn't just at the heart of art world valuation; it's become increasingly inescapable in much of the consumer goods landscape. Michael Weinberg, the executive director of NYU Law School's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, says fair use protects these complete acts of copying (as opposed to partial copies, like when a musician samples a short clip of a song). "When Google indexes a page for search, it copies the entire thing because it needs the entire thing," he says. "Similarly, if you are making a commentary about the importance of artistic provenance, your not-from-the-original-artist version needs to be identical to the original except for the fact that it comes from you and not Ai Weiwei." 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."
