His twisting slides at Tate Modern delighted millions and he has just turned a section of the Guggenheim Museum in New York into a hotel room, available for hire.

Now, the Belgian artist Carsten Höller is to stretch the definition of a work of art even further with his newest installation: a fully functioning nightclub, bar and restaurant in North London.

The Double Club, which will open for three months from Friday, is the latest example of a burgeoning art world trend – the blurring of lines between art viewing, entertainment and catering. It was not always so.

Twenty years ago Saatchi & Saatchi provoked uproar by advertising the Victoria and Albert Museum as “an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”.

In 1998 Damien Hirst and investors opened Pharmacy, a Notting Hill restaurant designed and decorated by the artist that was briefly the most fashionable place to eat in Britain. It folded in 2003 with debts of almost £2 million – but an auction of fixtures and fittings netted Hirst £11 million.

Now, leading galleries and museums are scrambling to put on events that straddle the boundaries between culture, music, eating and drinking.

The design agency ½bäke has just finished a two-week exhibition at Somerset House that included a “guerrilla restaurant” and all-day disco.

The Royal Academy is currently hosting GSK Contemporary,an exhibition that is open until midnight three times a week and blends cutting-edge visual art with a “pop-up restaurant”, cabaret and a bar. The restaurant is run by the team behind Bistrotheque, the unofficial house canteen of the East London art world. Two Christmases ago they set up a temporary winter wonderland eatery called The Reindeer off Brick Lane. It sold out.

Across the country, museums and galleries are embracing live events. Late openings, singles nights and even fancy-dress balls are standard tactics employed by museums and galleries to suck in new audiences.

The Double Club is unlikely to struggle for punters during its brief existence.

Situated in a Victorian warehouse behind Angel Tube station in North London, it has a gimmick that sets it apart from other clubs, bars and restaurants: everything in the club – the décor, the food, the drinks and the music – is available in either Western or Congolese cultural format.

Andrew Brown, the senior strategy officer for visual arts at the Arts Council, said that in the past five year “galleries and museums have become much more social spaces, opening them up to a bigger audience.

“In the future I imagine there will be even more crossover between galleries and hotels and restaurants.

“Increasingly we are seeing art at music festivals and in nightclubs – the distinction between all these things is becoming clouded.”

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