It is simply a fact of contemporary culture that artists are now brands, enmeshed in complicated systems of cache and currency, no different than Taylor Swift or Coco Chanel. Which is why Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst design “signature” T-shirts and handbags — because there is money to be made from slapping your name on mass-market (albeit often upscale, limited-edition) products. It’s a condition anticipated by Picasso and the market for his napkin doodles, and the results are the stock-in-trade of every museum gift shop you’ve ever walked into.

Culturelabel.com in the U.K. is the Walmart of museum shops, inasmuch as it aims to be a one-stop shopping experience for anyone looking for dinner plates or playing cards touched by the hand (or brand) of an artist. Functioning essentially as a one-stop shop for these “cultural” products, the catalog at Culturelabel lets you search for, say, T-shirts by British artist David Shrigley; when you find one that you like, by clicking on the product, you are redirected to the e-commerce site for the institution that stocks the shirt. Culturelabel gets a percentage of the sales generated through the site.

The enterprise has the blessing of the Conservative Party in Britain, where most nonprofit cultural institutions are supported by the state rather than through public fundraising. To its credit, the website prominently encourages culture-consumers to become members (read “donors”) of the institutions featured on the website, presumably as part of an effort to enhance philanthropic revenue. The website is also said to be developing methods of delivering e-tickets to exhibitions and phone apps for browsing museum collections.