Dinner with Tracey Emin, tea with Rodchenko ... we’re bringing a little culture to your dining table.” So reads the blurb on the art of dining section of culturelabel.com, a new website that aims to bring culture (or, more precisely, culturally-related products) not just to the dining table but to any part of your life.

Take picnics. Instead of laying out the hoummos on an oh-so-tasteful dark green number from the National Trust, you could be lounging back on one printed with a reproduction of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur L’herbe — yours for £158.22 and very jolly it is too, in a kitschy sort of way.

It’s all part of the search for products with meaning, which has been observed as a growing trend by a group of four men whom we might describe as cultural entrepreneurs. Peter Tullin, Simon Cronshaw, David Gilbert and Florian Wupperfield have worked in the arts for years and they are the people who, having observed what they call a “post-consumer” hunger for an emotional connection, are behind culturelabel.com, which launches this week.

They didn’t just spot one trend, they’d duly taken note of another: while high street sales were dropping, the internet was booming. Being entrepreneurial, they decided to think laterally and join the two together. They came up with Culture Label, which aims to bring more than 20,000 products together on one website. Almost all are curated from museums, galleries and other cultural institutions around Britain. In the future they’ll be trawling the rest of the world as well.

It was when they noticed that there were more people visiting Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project on its last day in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2003 than were shopping at the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent that they thought something was up. Then there are all the myriad collaborations between manufacturers and artists. Louis Vuitton ventured into this territory with designs by Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. Puma got together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the uber-curator at the Serpentine Gallery, and the Swiss artist John Armleder to design a handbag-cum-art object. Made of silver leather, it came filled with art-related goodies and with an appropriately arty price tag of $1,400.

Meanwhile, the group observed, some of the most attractive shops, those that Peter Tullin calls “curated” shops, were attached to museums and galleries. Time Out named the South Bank Centre as one of London’s top 100 shops; the New York Museum of Modern Art has a branch of its shop in Tokyo and is about to open another in Brazil, and several artists have themselves started coming up with products as a sideline to their fine art. Damien Hirst, for instance, sells artists’ products from his publishing company Other Criteria through two London outlets (see othercriteria.com).

While almost all the products on Culture Label have a connection to an artist (Tracey Emin’s plates, Zaha Hadid’s vase) or a cultural institution, most of us are likely to judge them in much the same way as any other object: how much we (or our nearest and dearest) might need or want it.

Many are undoubtedly attractive — there are items as diverse as rolls of flock wallpaper from the surreal Glaswegian duo Timorous Beasties at the V&A for £50 each; a Tubby armchair from the London Transport Museum, £601; limited-edition artists’ prints from the Central Illustration Agency starting at £130; a paper modelling kit of Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp (the Barbican, £15); a reproduction Henry Dreyfuss 302 phone used during the Second World War at the Imperial War Museum for £48.94, and a giant triceratops soft toy (£1,000 from the Natural History Museum).

But it’s also hoped that a trawl through the site could entice visitors to make the journey to some of the amazing places that they’ve never managed to visit. Those living down south might journey up to the Baltic in Newcastle (which Peter Tullin says has the best shop in the city). Others might head to the Lowry in Manchester, Designersblock London or make a point of going to the Vauxhall Art Car Boot Sale (this year’s has just ended, but you can find its wares at Culture Label).

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