The art market is shifting. The collectors who understand what that means are already working with advisors like Myrtha Herrera.
For most of the twentieth century, buying art seriously meant one of two things: inheriting a collection or building one through decades of gallery relationships, auction house access, and hard-won institutional knowledge. The idea that a first-generation collector — someone without a family name attached to a museum wing — could enter the market at the highest level and build something meaningful was, at best, a long shot.
That has changed. And few people have done more to make it change than the generation of art advisors who came of age understanding both the cultural and financial dimensions of the market with equal fluency. Myrtha Herrera is one of them.
A Different Kind of Expertise
Born in Mexico City and based in New York, Herrera founded collēctum after training at Christie’s New York, Christie’s London, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art — where she completed a Master’s in Art Business. That combination of auction house experience and academic market training gives her something most advisors in either camp lack: a precise understanding of how value is created, sustained, and realized across the full arc of an artist’s career.
“The art market is not one market,” she says. “It is dozens of overlapping markets, each with its own logic, its own collectors, its own pressure points. What works in the primary market for an emerging artist has almost nothing to do with what drives value at auction for a post-war blue-chip name. You have to know both to advise well.”
That dual fluency has shaped the way collēctum approaches every client relationship — not as a series of transactions, but as a long-term strategy built around a collector’s specific goals, risk tolerance, and cultural aspirations.
The Blue-Chip Question
For collectors entering the market with serious capital, the temptation is to go straight to established names — artists whose auction records are public, whose museum placements are documented, whose value trajectory feels predictable. It is a reasonable instinct. It is also, Herrera argues, only half a strategy.
“Blue-chip works offer liquidity and legibility,” she says. “If you need to sell, you can. If you want to loan to a museum, there’s a conversation to be had. But the financial upside is limited precisely because the market has already priced in the consensus. The real returns — financial and cultural — come from identifying the right artist before that consensus forms.”
Her track record on that point is increasingly difficult to argue with. When collēctum was commissioned to select the landmark sculpture for Cero5Cien, one of the most prestigious luxury residential developments in Latin America, Herrera selected Alma Allen — a self-taught sculptor based in Tepoztlán, Mexico, working largely outside the major gallery system. The selection was made on curatorial conviction. The validation came later: Allen will represent the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale, one of the most significant platforms in contemporary art. The works placed at Cero5Cien were acquired before that announcement. Their cultural — and financial — significance has grown considerably since.
Where the Market Is Moving
The broader art market is in the middle of a significant structural shift, and Herrera has a front-row seat to it.
The traditional gatekeepers — the major auction houses, the blue-chip galleries, the art fair circuit — remain important. But the geography of influence is changing. Latin American collectors, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth, and Asian family offices are entering the market with scale and sophistication, bringing with them different aesthetic frameworks, different cultural reference points, and different ideas about what constitutes value.
For Herrera, growing up between Mexico City and New York gave her an early and intuitive understanding of how taste operates across cultural borders — and how an artist who commands attention in one market can be radically undervalued in another.
“I have always moved between worlds,” she says. “That gives you a different kind of eye. You see what one market hasn’t discovered yet because you already know it from another.”
That perspective has informed collēctum’s approach to emerging artist identification — looking beyond the predictable circuits of New York and London toward practices developing in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia that have not yet been absorbed into the mainstream market.
The Collector Experience
What distinguishes collēctum’s approach to private clients is not simply the quality of the acquisitions but the depth of the relationship built around them. For Herrera, advising a collector means educating one — attending art fairs and gallery shows together, discussing not just what to buy but why, and creating experiences that deepen a collector’s connection to the work they live with.
That has included organizing private dinners in clients’ homes with artists of international significance — encounters that transform a collector’s relationship with the work on their walls from ownership into genuine understanding. It is a level of access that most collectors, even serious ones, have never had — and one that pays dividends not just culturally but financially. Collectors who understand their collections deeply make better long-term decisions about what to acquire, what to hold, and what to let go.
The Advisor as Strategic Partner
The art market in 2025 rewards knowledge, relationships, and patience in roughly equal measure. The collectors who will build the most significant collections over the next decade are not the ones with the largest budgets. They are the ones who find the right advisor early — someone who can read the market, identify talent before consensus forms, and build a collection that holds its value culturally as well as financially.
That is the conversation Myrtha Herrera is having with her clients. And in a market moving as quickly as this one, having it early makes all the difference.
collēctum is a New York–based art consultancy specializing in advisory services for collectors, architects, real estate developers, and hospitality groups. collectum.art.
