Amanda Ba and Gwyneth Giller spiral into Girl Talk, navigating the art world at large with occasional weed dealer existentialism.
Amanda opens our Zoom call with her iPad propped on her bed. She’s lying on her stomach, feet kicked up behind her head, like she’s about to address intellectualism in the most coquette manner you’ve ever seen. And she does. Somewhere between too many snoozed alarms, Amanda Ba is building her own universe and clawing through a cycle of self-evolution.
We move through her big ideas and my brain-rot tendencies, somehow landing in a place that casually threatens to unravel every art world norm. We conquer her fallen Depop empire and the mechanics of being courted by a gallery (an art world mating ritual). It’s the kind of conversation where you realize “girl brain” is actually a sophisticated neural operating system. Or as Amanda puts it, “Girl Talk, actually smart?”
Gwyneth Giller: What have we been up to so far today?
Amanda Ba: Today I woke up to talk to you. That’s it.
GG: Are you usually a night owl? Do you wake up late?
AB: I’ve been trying to correct my schedule because my assistants go into work at a certain time, usually around 10. I try to go in around then too, which forces my schedule to be better. I think if left to my own devices, I’d have an evil sleep schedule.
GG: What is the first thing you do every morning when you wake up?
AB: I open my eyes and I’m like, “Oh fuck, I hit snooze too many times and now I have to run to work.”
GG: What’s your alarm sound?
AB: The terrible one.
GG: No, why would you do that?
AB: It just needs to be something where I feel like I have to deal with it right now. What’s your alarm sound?
GG: Thank you for asking. It’s “Replay” by Zendaya, from her Disney Channel days.
AB: I didn’t even know you could make your alarm a song.
GG: Remember when cell phones became a thing and everyone realized individualism was possible and you could buy custom ringtones? You can do the same thing for an alarm.
AB: It’s probably the only way iTunes makes money now.
GG: True. What’s your go-to karaoke song?
GG: So, you grew up in both Ohio and Hefei, China—what was that contrast like?
AB: I was in Hefei first, when I was really young—up until I was about five. So my memories are pretty limited, but it was just what I immediately accepted. When I first became lucid, I was like, “Oh, this is my life,” living there with my grandparents. My memories are sparse, but when I would go back and visit, it was always very warm. My grandparents were very warm.
GG: That sounds special. And Ohio?
AB: Coming back to Ohio, at first I was like, “Whoa, I’m not really too sure what I’m doing here.” I had spent most of that time with my grandparents, I actually hadn’t spent that much time with my parents. When I came back, my parents already had my little brother. I don’t really have any image of seeing my mom with a belly or anticipating another kid coming. I just got back and it was like, “You guys already have a kid.” And I was trying to figure out how I fit into the picture.
GG: That must’ve been difficult.
AB: But, you know, kids adjust very quickly. Looking back, in some ways, those places actually have something in common. As cities within their countries, they’re both sort of average places, I mean that in a statistical sense.
GG: Oh interesting…Elaborate.
AB: I mean, vibe-wise too, people might consider them average. They’re not places anyone really goes to for vacation—there isn’t any particular historical or cultural draw. But they are places where regular people live. I mean, Ohio lives in my mind rent-free. It’s a cultural phenomenon, the way it’s been classified as mundane.
GG: Do you know the song “Swag Like Ohio?”
AB: I love that song.
GG: I feel like it kind of articulates how Ohio gets ironically eaten up and regurgitated in popular culture as this mundane, yet iconic place. Oh–have you seen the new season of Love Is Blind?
AB: I haven’t, but I’ve seen clips.
GG: It’s based in Ohio.
AB: Oh, really? Love is Blind is based in Ohio?
GG: This season. You know how every season they do a different city, so the people they’re matching can potentially live together and don’t have to move states?
AB: Oh, I kind of didn’t know that. I just thought they took a random selection of people.
GG: That would be monstrous. There are lives on the line here.
AB: There’s love on the line.
GG: [laughs] What was the last piece of clothing you bought yourself?
AB: I think I bought this jacket from a Ukrainian seller on Poshmark. It’s red, by this brand called Khujo. Actually—wait—it was on eBay.
GG: eBay just bought Depop.
AB: Really? I feel like that’s the best-case scenario for them, honestly. When you make a startup, you just want to develop it and then sell it. I don’t imagine they want to be responsible for the ebbs and flows of Depop forever.
GG: I feel like that might be everyone’s life goal now in late-stage capitalism.
AB: We’re living in the startup era, just an endless cycle. It doesn’t even matter if your startup succeeds or fails. You just prove that you have the ability to have an idea and get venture capitalists to sign on, and then you can get funding for a new project in the future.
GG: True, it’s actually kind of a miracle eBay bought Depop, now they have real financial backing. I know this because I saw a Depop commercial on Hulu.
AB: What were you watching?
GG: Kim and Kourtney Take New York. Have you ever seen it?
AB: No, but I actually recently watched The Kardashians for the very first time.
GG: What episode are you on?
AB: The episode where Travis Barker proposes to Kourtney Kardashian.
GG: Oh my god. I implore you to watch the really early seasons, they make me appreciate the efforts of their rebrand. They were literally so trashy. In the last episode I watched, Kris Jenner does a keg stand in Las Vegas at like 2:00 a.m.
AB: Damn, she’s lit. That’s one interesting thing about her—she really is mother.
GG: She low-key kind of pimped out her daughters, but it paid off.
AB: Oh yeah, definitely. She’s like the house matriarch, and she deploys her kin at the right moments.
GG: She kind of is in charge of all of their lives. Did you ever have that sort of dynamic with your mom?
AB: Not at all. And I would not like that. I think there’s a certain point in your life when you don’t need to call your parents very often anymore, and you don’t need their opinion on everything. Let them live their life, and they should want you to live yours.
GG: When you moved out, was the first place you moved to New York?
AB: Yeah.
GG: What was your first New York apartment like?
AB: I went to Columbia University, so the first place I lived in New York was a dorm.
GG: Who was your roommate? Do you guys still keep in touch?
AB: Oh no, but she was a really sweet international Chinese STEM girl. Needless to say, we were really, really different. She’d be up at like 6:00 a.m. studying, eating an apple in bed.
GG: You’re like, okay—not for me, but go off.
AB: I wish her the best.
GG: What was your life like in Ohio?
AB: It was very WASPy suburban vibes.
GG: What was your 2016 era like? Describe your outfits, your personality, your influences.
AB: I had a Depop empire.
GG: Love.
AB: To the point where I was getting care packages because I was in the top one percentile of sellers or something. I think I was a wholesome Ohio girl: high-rise jeans, a boyfriend, a small friend group. I went thrifting to flip things for my Depop empire.
GG: Classic.
AB: And I had a different friend group where we would smoke weed or whatever, but it was kind of separate. It was like the girls, and then my druggie guys.
GG: Do you have a pivotal drug dealer memory that lives in your head?
AB: I remember pulling up to this condo complex that everyone knew was sus. It was like, “Shit just goes down here.” You don’t even know what exactly, but you know something’s always happening there.
I think I was going to pick up weed from this guy who was like three grades above me. He had already graduated—I was probably a junior or something. I go to his place and he’s just hanging out with some girls from high school who were younger than me.
And I remember having this moment where I was finally old enough to think, maybe it’s actually not cool to be the now 20-year-old guy hanging out with 16-year-olds.
GG: Yeah, I remember being a 16-year-old girl and being interested in guys who were a few years older than me and thinking it was cool they gave me attention. Now I look back at it and I’m like… yeah, that was actually really weird.
AB: I wish I had realized it when I was younger. That was the main thing—I thought he would have moved on and met other people. I didn’t think he’d keep dipping back into the same sort of underage well.
GG: I mean, that’s a type. Loser vibes.
AB: Yeah, I think in that moment I felt confidently able to say that someone is a loser.
GG: What do you think your biggest vice is?
AB: Ooh, that’s a very interesting question. You know, if I notice something, I try to correct it. Ideally my vices are always changing, you know? Because if I had one lifelong vice that I just couldn’t shake, that would suck. I think right now maybe my vice is impatience.
GG: What’s a current fixation you have that you feel particularly impatient about?
AB: Well, right now—on more of a macro, life level—I’m trying to change my work. First, I have to work on my paintings to the point where I feel confident showing a new body of work. If the work isn’t good, then none of it really means anything.
It’s a long process, and the stakes feel high.
GG: I was going to ask if you’re spiritual—like, are you manifesting things? Or are you very pragmatic?
AB: You know, I think I’m pragmatic, but I think they’re the same operation functioning. It’s just a different way of describing it in your head.
GG: Say more.
AB: If you’re manifesting, you have this belief that as long as you set an intention, the universe—or whatever—will make it true for you. And if you’re pragmatic, you’re essentially saying: I have a goal, and I’m going to think about that goal all the time, or keep it operating subconsciously even when I’m not actively working. It’s not that the universe—or some aura in the universe—is constructing things for you. It’s that, because you’re pivoting your decisions to facilitate your goal, it becomes likely that some aspect of it will end up happening.
So I think it’s really the same mechanism, just a very different way of framing it and thinking about it.
GG: Is there an unspoken art world rule that you hate?
AB: It’s a very broad issue, but it feels like there are a lot of practices people are afraid to break. You know, this industry is simple and complicated at the same time. Financially it’s really complicated, because in some ways it operates almost like the finance world, a banking/investment industry.
GG: Or like the mafia.
AB: Yeah, sometimes. What artists do is very simple: we make one object and we sell that object. That element of it is straightforward. Most of the time there aren’t huge global production chains that need to be factored in. Unless you’re like Koons, it’s not a massive corporation of stratified labor.
So for an industry where individual people could have a lot of agency, there’s still this industry standard—like a supposedly genial, cordial way to do things. It’s an arrangement everyone has settled on because it works well enough. But it also seems really difficult to challenge any of these arbitrary rules around finances or logistics.
For example, a typical clause is that the artist gets paid within 30 days of the gallery receiving payment from the collector. And I don’t really have a problem with that. I’m just bringing it up as an example because it’s kind of neutral for this conversation. But it’s like—why 30 days? It could be longer, it could be shorter. At some point it just became the industry standard.
And then there’s the sort of song and dance of galleries sending you art books. When they start sending you art books, you’re like, oh, we’re kind of dating now.
GG: You’re being courted.
AB: Or galleries having to appease collectors and maintain relationships by sending everyone birthday or holiday gifts. These kinds of things—once someone starts doing them, then if you’re a gallery that doesn’t do it, it looks like you’re not as committed.
GG: A mating ritual. There are so many customs, it really is a culture in itself.
AB: It’s a whole culture—and an industry that’s supposed to be forward-thinking, risk-taking, ideologically expansive. So it’s kind of funny that we participate in all of these little mandated things.
GG: True. It’s so embedded at this point. I think I have similar feelings, I try to entertain the same ideological notions people often project onto how the art world functions. It’s hard to accept that it’s not always just a free-spirited, love-fest of self expansion and community.
AB: I just listened to this audiobook, “Boom” by Michael Shnayerson. It’s basically about how the art world evolved to what it is today, focusing on dealers and galleries. It traces the model from the postwar period, when American art was just beginning to overtake European—especially French art—in terms of what people were excited about. It traces the market progression of contemporary art, up to the sort of beast it’s become today.
That was really interesting because we call it the art world, but many elements of it lean more toward an art industry.
GG: We could go on and on about this. I feel like we could have a podcast.
AB: Yeah, I mean—Girl Talk, actually smart?
GG: [laughs] I think it’s important, if you’re an artist, when you’re facing this set of conventions—which can be intimidating if you’re not working on the sales side and you’re not acclimated to that part of the business, which is actually the dominant side—to remember that you have space to question things.
AB: True.
GG: What was the last brain-rot media you consumed?
AB: Um, I just watched the first episode of the Reality Check series about America’s Next Top Model on Netflix. I like the way they edited that show.
GG: Same, I’ve learned a lot from it because I wasn’t really following America’s Next Top Model when I was younger.
AB: Me neither. I think I was a little too young to actually follow it.
GG: That show is weird because, on the topic of brain rot, it illustrates how poisonous yet glorified that mindset is—and how it can be weaponized against other innocent girl-brain functions, you know?
AB: Yes. It analyzes all the steps that lead up to a girl absolutely sobbing over a haircut. I’m not even talking about the episode where they messed up Ebony’s hair really badly—that was fucked up. But you know—some blonde girl gets a bob and then sobs. And I’m like, okay, this is a girl brain-rot response, but it’s also indicative of much deeper things that have been implanted in your teenage brain that cause you to crash out over a slight change in your looks.
GG: What’s the last intellectual form of media you consumed?
AB: I’m reading some serious books right now because I’m writing something on the topic of figuration. I’m reading some art history and theory books in order to write my essay, so I’m tapping back into academia. Rosalind Krauss’s Modernist Myths is a great book.
GG: Conspiracy theory that you believe?
AB: Oh God. I listened to this really dark independent journalism podcast about an Afghanistan veteran—an American veteran—who had repressed memories of being on Epstein’s island as a trafficked child. I listened to it before a lot of the more recent files about Jeffrey Epstein were released, and I remember thinking, this is maybe some of the darkest stuff I’ve ever heard.
But then when the files started coming out, I was like… it’s all within the realm of possibility. Once you’re already implicated in child trafficking, where’s the line? Where do you stop?
At this point it’s hard to tell what’s real or not, especially when some of the most elaborate conspiracy theories end up being partially accurate. I think the truth is always somewhere in between—between what authorities want you to believe and what the public wants to believe. Something like that.
GG: Speaking of truth, what’s something you’d like people to understand about your work?
AB: Well, I would like it to always be changing. I want every body of work to be significantly different from the one before it—or at least that’s what I try to do. So I don’t know if people sometimes expect more of the same things they already like. I don’t even know if that’s true, but I hope people embrace the effort of change.
GG: That’s beautiful, I can’t wait to see your next body of work.
Written by Gwyneth Giller
