‘You cannot begin by calling me France’s most famous living artist!’: Sophie Calle interviewed

‘You cannot begin by calling me France’s most famous living artist!’ Thus Sophie Calle objected to the first line of the obituary I wrote for her, commissioned for the enormous exhibition, À toi de faire, ma mignonne (‘Over to you, sweetie’), that currently occupies the whole Musée National Picasso-Paris. But modesty aside, it is a fact that no other French artist alive today is so celebrated, loved, debated, denounced and, indeed, imitated, around the world as Calle.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death and that his most important museum should officially mark this by inviting Calle to take over its institution, replacing all his work with her own, is a brilliant provocation. Calle’s response has been equally bold; though she turned 70 as the show opened, she decided to pay homage to Picasso’s death by staging her own, creating a veritable mausoleum filled with personal reliquaries, souvenirs and totems, as though she had just passed, including that ‘Living Obit’ to record her fictional extinction.

‘Do I die now or in 30 years? So much of my work has been about death, especially that of my family. My grande tante clung on until 100 and of course Picasso himself nearly made it to 100. I was even once going to stage my funeral as a theatrical dress rehearsal.’ Having long mined her own life for her work, Calle now happily mines her death; until 7 January next year, Musée Picasso will serve as a sort of giant wake, displaying the entire contents of her house, not least her celebrated art collection and equally renowned personal wardrobe, bursting with haute couture and avant-garde treasures. Here furniture, crockery, every Calle chattel is laid out and documented in a catalogue from auctioneers Drouot, as if her complete posthumous estate were up for sale.