Lick My Canicule
The French heat waves are exposing larger problems within the Euro-centric art world.
Many years ago, I almost bought a house that was perched atop a flight of cracked and narrow concrete steps above Laurel Canyon Cleaners. It was charming and historic and full of the Los Angeles character I was seeking for my first home purchase. Despite the difficulty of access, I made an offer and went into escrow. An inspector was called to assess the property, which was both menaced by the abutting hillside and a menace to the homes it was stacked on top of. He immediately ruled against it.
“But it’s lasted this long, this way,” I said. “It’s 90 years old and still here.”
“Yeah, well, you can smoke a pack a day for decades and still die of lung disease at 90,” he responded. Point taken, I pulled out.
I think about this exchange when I speak to others about the effects of climate change on art, museums, collections, and the cities they’re based in. I have heard the refrain that things will be okay because they’ve been okay so far, from Venice to Miami and even in Menton, where it has been insisted to me that the storm which flooded the Musée Cocteau in 2018 was a one-off fluke. In a recent dustup in the pages of Tatler Magazine, the architect of the Musée Cocteau, Rudy Riciotti, refused to accept a crumb of blame for his faulty design and in the same breath, denied climate change had anything to do with the destruction of the building he conceived of (he also admitted that he did not respect the work of Cocteau at all, which, whatever.)
The problem with burying your head in the sand is that it will only feel worse when it’s ripped out — and it is always going to be ripped out.
I write this from Los Angeles, where I’ve just returned after being in Paris for a few months, during which I barely made it through not one, not two, but three crippling canicules. You may think you understand how hot it was, but unless you were there, you cannot. For several long stretches, Paris was the hottest place on Earth, and with a populace that lacks the infrastructure or knowledge of how to live in hot climes, it was devastating. (There is a fourth heat wave ripping through France right now, on top of it all.)
As I self-isolated in my mercifully, partially A/C’ed apartment, I grew angrier and more frustrated by the hour. I would look out my window and see elderly neighbors being carted away by EMTs simultaneously administering emergency care and searching for bags of ice from nearby restaurants (hospitals in France are not climatized) to literally “put them on ice” in efforts to cool them down. I watched several dogs refuse to go on walks, the pavement too hot on their paws, owners clueless to the problem. It felt a little bit like microdosing the trauma of April 2020-era Covid lockdowns: some parties took it seriously, others baffingly did not at their own peril, and basic mitigation measures were instantly politicized (being in favor of installing A/C is now a right-wing opinion in France, apparently.)
What sent me over a personal edge, though, was seeing a collecting number of Parisian museums announce that they would close through the heat waves due to lack of proper climatisation: the Musée Carnavalet, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Musée du Louvre have all shuttered either partially or outright for these reasons.
I have been told, many times, in many different ways, that preparing and worrying about art collection management in the era of extreme weather (to put it in a rather unsexy way) was a uniquely Californian thing (italicized to emphasize the utter disdain that came with the designation.) Every time I insisted to others that I should be seen as a canary in a coal mine in regards to the situation in Menton, I was told that it was just a fluke, that other institutions were better built, had better budgets, and were better prepared. I was told that the Peggy collection storage might be directly underneath the palazzo, but we have always called it The Bunker because it’s so watertight and Miami’s weathered plenty, nobody should worry about the Pérez falling into the Atlantic and The Getty windows are literally fireproof, it’s so safe.
The Bunker is watertight until it isn’t, and the Pérez will be sturdy until it isn’t, and the Getty will be fireproof until it isn’t. You can smoke a pack a day for decades and still die of lung disease at a very old age.
In January 2025 we collectively held our breaths as we watched the LA fires menace the Getty Villa and in seconds swallow whole what some insurers have suspected may be billions of dollars worth of art in private collections. This was seen as a Californian problem when others would ask me about it later on; they’d ask me about fire season the way that I imagine some would ask about hurricane season in Louisiana. Detached from the reality that the climate disaster there may have something to do, at some point, with a climate disaster here. I was once told by someone, “well, thank goodness we don’t have to worry about crazy things like that in France.”
Yesterday I spoke with a friend in Nice who told me that the tracks of the railroads were softening from the extreme heat, leaving trains packed to the gills stranded in tunnels.
This morning, I was awoken from jet-lagged slumber by my friend Clark pinging the group chat: "La forêt de Fontainebleau is on fire. [Our friend] had to evacuate.”
“The French [are] experiencing what we experienced in 2025,” he said.
I hate being proven right, despite appearances.
When I first set out to get clarity around the current situation in Menton and signs of movement around the closure of the Musée Jean Cocteau-collection Severin Wunderman, it became apparent that I would have to provoke, goad and otherwise irritate the southern French — a slow-paced, sunbaked culture and people — into action via the press.
I hired a PR firm (who have done an incredible job) and we got going. I gave them a series of proposed angles to pursue — Holocaust survivor grandfather, former sex educator slash club rat granddaughter, incredibly important queer artist, and so on, and so forth. I also kept pressing them about the fact that this story is one of climate disaster in the art world.
Very few of those pitches got traction. It was only once I relented and consented to my publicists framing me as an ‘eccentric Gucci heiress’ — a designation that I loathe for a plethora of reasons, but begrudgingly accept — was the response and desire to cover me swift.
And so, I suppose my question, is this: do you believe me now ?
My inbox is open.
x
Chloë