Didn't Downtown Die Ages Ago?

Jada Yuan profiles the Delusional Downtown Divas in New York Magazine:

Dunham and best friends Sara Rossein (editor), Joana D’Avillez (Swann), and Isabel Halley (AgNess; Halley is the daughter of artist and Index publisher Peter Halley) initially conceived the series as a fun little experiment to skewer the New York art scene they’d grown up in and had recently rejoined. Their characters are desperate to be famous, and utterly clueless about what that takes. (Comparisons to Absolutely Fabulous are welcome.) “It’s just a thing we put on the Internet that we thought a very small segment of the population would see,” Dunham says. Though the segment of the population that has seen it is still very small, it happens to contain some very influential people—including Yvonne Force Villareal, who displayed the first episode as installation art in her APF Lab gallery; Isaac Mizrahi, who plays life coach to the girls when their gay friend Jazzy disappears; hunky conceptual artist (and Mary-Kate Olsen’s boyfriend) Nate Lowman, who plays the object of Oona’s misguided affection; and painter Deborah Kass, who is simply a fan. […] Most of the filming, they say, has been “renegade,” like when D’Avillez and Rossein funded their own trip to Miami for Art Basel, then realized they didn’t have clearance to shoot and had to beg two official cameramen to lend them equipment for ten minutes. Yet, setbacks aside, it seems that in the process of making fun of young people trying to penetrate the art world, the girls behind the DDDs have done exactly that. “The characters are definitely versions of us,” Dunham says. But, adds Halley, “with much bigger delusions of grandeur.”

For more of the videos go to Index Magazine

Almost Famous (New York Magazine)