Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) will be offered this November at Christie’s, New York with an estimate on request in excess of $50 million.

The benchmark is his record-setting sale of Hurting the Word Radio #2 (also 1964) for $52.5 million at the same house in 2019.

This is the second $50M+ lot announced for the November auctions, the other being the Magritte, guaranteed to sell for at least $95 million.

This past May, the highest realized price was $46 million — very low by comparison with the records in most recent auction seasons.

With these two offerings, we can already expect the highest end of the fall auction season to look considerably different from the spring 2024 season.

It’s a buyer’s market for many artists, but the fluctuations at the highest end of the art market also depend highly on circumstance.

Hear more about trends in the art market on the recent episode of the Private Client Risk & Resilience Podcast, on which I was a guest this week.