Deciphering the November 2023 Auctions with WSJ's Kelly Crow

Welcome to Christie's Education Podcast: Jetstreams. Our guest for the inaugural episode is the award winning journalist, Kelly Crow, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal covering the art market, from major auction sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips and other houses, to analysis of the funding and art-buying activities of the world’s major museums, art fairs, artists, and collectors around the world. Kelly has covered the art market for the Journal since 2006. In this episode we discuss:

• The origins of Kelly’s unique perspective on the art world, the distance from growing up in a small community in Oklahoma to now reporting on the inner reaches of the elite art world and writing for a paper that that reports for the man on the street who is less familiar with it.
• What everyone in the art world has been talking about: what did happen at those bellwether auctions here in New York this past November? Are we in a downturn, are we not? How do we read these mixed tea leaves?
• Differences in the art market downturn of 2008 and now, and a sense of whether prices have dropped in 2023, and by how much. And auction house pricing strategies that seemed to work well.
• Auction sell-through rates and what that means in terms of the health of the market.
• Whether activity in the Fall auctions slowed the strong post-pandemic trend towards female artists and artists of color.
• Activity from Asian Collectors given the slowing of the Chinese economy.
• The passing of the baton of auctioneers from one generation to the next, with longtime auctioneer Jussi Pylkannan leaving Christie’s, to the rising star of Phyllis Kao, the first female Asian auctioneer to take a white glove evening sale.
• Surprising signs of life in the Digital and NFT sectors of the art market.
• Kelly’s provocative answer to Jetstreams “Grab and Run Question,” where we ask our guests as well as our listeners, to describe the work of art in the museum of their own mind, which artwork they value above all others and why that is.

Find Kelly Crow at:

The Wall Street Journal

X: @KellyCrowWSJ

IG: @kellycrowwsj

LinkedIn: Kelly Crow

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Recorded at The Newsstand Studios in Rockefeller Center.
Thank you for listening.