I have a scene in my novel where my main character goes to a festival and sees several real artists perform. He ends up disrupting the performance, and has a short conversation with one of the artists, before he’s thrown out.

Am I allowed to use the names of real life artists, or must I make up fake ones?

So I love your idea! I wrote something similar which wasn’t as exciting; probably because of that, it was never published. I was pretty sure the radio host Melinda Lee would not mind being featured as my main character, but since I wasn’t sure (she needed a character flaw and a character arc, after all), I came up with a completely different name but went ahead and shamelessly based the character on the real-life person, whose radio show I enjoy.
You can do the same thing. Evoke “Julie Child” without ever using that name; now you have the freedom to change a convenient detail or two to make your story even stronger.
This is what David Weber did with Horatio Hornblower: not a real person, but a beloved main character of C.S. Forester’s series of novels. David Weber reimagined a distinctly Horatio-like naval officer in a series of SF adventures: Weber kept the initials but changed the gender and most other minor details, like what it meant in the futuristic culture to be “yeoman-born”. The estate of C.S. Forester hasn’t had any trouble with the adaptation as far as I know. Possibly because Weber’s acknowledgment of Forester’s brilliance has attracted a whole new generation of fans to buy the Hornblower books, just to see why Weber found them so inspiring.
…but also because Honor Harrington shares very little in common with Horatio Hornblower, besides a hauntingly similar character arc, a similar tactical brilliance, a similar blindness to their own excellence in command, and eerily similar ship-handling challenges despite seven thousand years of technological development between the “wet navies” of Hornblower’s time and the “star navies” of Harrington’s time. (So yeah, an obvious update of Horatio for fans who know him, but with plenty of “plausible deniability” worked in.)

Thank you

– Chris

I have a feeling that the Julia Child estate would sue, or write a cease and desist.
Would a changing of the names be any help, or is it indeed a parody? Isn’t it the same concept as putting Marilyn Monroe in a movie or a fascimile of the blond bombshell who is not Monroe? Knowing that the JC Foundation and estate is extremely protective of her likeness, brand and image, i am hesitant to move further, but love the idea.