"Women can choose to knock each other down or build each other up. I choose the latter."

Said Ivanka Trump, ironically knocking the artist Jennifer Rubell, who'd made a performance piece called "Ivanka Vacuuming." 

 

Rubell said: "I truly did not intend the piece to be only a critique of her. I thought it was just as indicting of the viewer and all of us in our perception of her. I invited her to see the show. I was so naïve — I thought she would think it was kind of funny." 

That happened in 2019, but I didn't notice at the time. I'm seeing it today in a NYT piece called "As Their D.C. Days Dwindle, Ivanka and Jared Look for a New Beginning/The end of President Trump’s time in office leaves his daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, looking for a new home — but they appear to have plans in New Jersey."

Here's a WaPo article from February 2019, "The performance piece ‘Ivanka Vacuuming’ seems to irk the first daughter even more than ‘fake news’": 

Rubell’s work invites multiple interpretations, including ones that suggest the idea of a “taint” or stain or ineradicable blight, and others that speak directly to ideas of wealth and the cultural laundering of wealth.... As visitors throw crumbs onto a carpet, the stand-in Ivanka Hoovers them up, with a rictus of a smile on her face. In a literal but comic sense, she is doing the “clean up” work that she struggles to do within the administration, which always seems to soil things — even its own efforts to dismantle political and social contracts. Is Donald Trump racist? No matter, Ivanka will clean up the mess, even as her father tweets out more dog-whistle racism.... 

There is something Sisyphean in the two-hour performance. The crumbs just keep coming, and the cleaning up is never done. Crumbs recall the economics of wealth and poverty, the idea of trickle-down economics, and the old saying commonly but falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette: Let them eat cake (or brioche). Perhaps the crumbs are us, the 99 percent, the “losers” in the great economic shakedown of late capitalism... 

There may be, even now, people buzzing about [“Ivanka Vacuuming”] at dinner parties on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and that chatter is a form of invisible work — cutting and etching and effacing all the possible Ivankas in ways that are both invisible and indelible.

That chatter is a form of invisible work! Women's work... it includes chatter. Chatter while drinking in posh locations. When will we women ever get equal pay for equal work? And when will people even begin to fathom the work that we do?! Vacuuming endlessly, cleaning up metaphorically, picking up crumbs and etching and effacing. It's laborious!