This is when I let each girl in on a secret: It can be yours. No different from falling in love with a song, one may fall in love with a work of art and claim it as one’s own. Ownership does not come free. One must spend time with it; visit at different times of the day or evening; and bring to it one’s full attention. The investment will be repaid as one discovers something new with each viewing — say, a detail in the background, a person nearly cropped from the picture frame, or a tiny patch of canvas left unpainted, deliberately so, one may assume, as if to remind you not to take all the painted parts for granted.

This is true not just for New Yorkers but for anyone anywhere with art to be visited — art being a relative term, in my definition. Your Monet may, in fact, be an unpolished gemstone or mineral element. Natural history museums are filled with beauties fairly begging to be adopted. Stay alert. Next time a tattered Egyptian mummy speaks to you across the ages, don’t walk away. Stay a while. Spend some time with it. Give it a proper name: Yours.

But don’t be hasty. You must be sure you are besotted. When it happens, you will know. A couple of years back, I spent much of Memorial Day at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend Oliver, a self-described philistine when it comes to art. He struggled to see the value in the work of the performance artist Marina Abramovic as she sat gazing into the eyes of museum visitors. And the enormous, bright red Barnett Newman painting, “Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” got him all worked up, railing against the pretensions of abstract expressionism.

This was my cue to lead Oliver to another gallery on another floor and steer him toward an early, rose-tinted Picasso. He smiled a smile that even Edvard Munch might have wanted to paint. And he stayed and stayed and stayed, a self-appointed sentinel to Picasso’s “Boy Leading a Horse.”

It’s yours, I said. Congratulations.

I have been slowly adding to my own collection since moving to New York. I acquired a Francis Bacon nude that I fell hard for at the artist’s retrospective at the Met five years ago. The piece was on loan from a European museum, and the fact that I might never see it again made it all the more irresistible. My naked Bacon and I are forever embroiled in a long-distance romance.