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Warhol could fetch $80M as art-auction season kicks off

The red-hot art market could yield $1.2 billion-plus in sales when New York’s two-week art-auction season kicks off Tuesday.

Andy Warhol’s “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” reportedly may fetch as much as $80 million at Sotheby’s postwar and contemporary art sale Nov. 13.

And Warhol may be upstaged by the Nov. 12 Christie’s sale of a triptych by the British painter Francis Bacon, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud.” Estimates say that may draw as much as $86 million in the sky-high market fueled by the influx of Russian, Chinese and Arab buyers. — it’s possible that the Warhol or the Bacon could set a record for the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.A huge oil by Gerhard Richter set the record of $37 million last spring at Sotheby’s.

The current champ is Edvard Munch’s iconic “The Scream,” which went for nearly $120 million at Sotheby’s in spring 2012.

History could be also made when a giant orange work, one of five colored “Balloon Dogs” by Jeff Koons, goes under the hammer.

Christies estimates it will sell for $35 million to $55 million, setting a record for highest price for a living artist.