This article is more than 5 months old

This article is more than 5 months old

For anyone who feels they could do a better job than the art professionals who choose what we see at exhibitions comes a game-changing project: curate your own show.

The charity Art UK, which lists every publicly owned oil painting on its online database and is in the process of adding every sculpture, has announced details of a new curation tool.

It will allow members of the public to curate their own online shows, choosing from more than 200,000 oil paintings and 16,000 sculptures in UK galleries from the Shetlands to Scilly.

The tool will also allow galleries to capture and record their own physical exhibitions, with the artworks, introduction and texts.

“It will allow collections to digitally freeze real exhibitions so they can live on,” said Andrew Ellis, the director of Art UK. “It will be a really fantastic opportunity. If there was, say, a Sickert show in Manchester, in 20 years’ time you could look back and see that show.”

With so many art exhibitions being cancelled, the new tool will allow galleries to put on display the shows they wanted the public to see.

The tool will be ready by May. “We are really excited,” said Ellis. “We’re sad that it isn’t ready now, but going forward it will be one of the critical ways we can help collections.”

People who curate their own shows will be able to choose if they want the whole world to see it or just their friends.

If someone wanted to curate a show devoted to the artist with more paintings in British collections than any other, they would alight on the unlikely figure of John Everett.

The Dorset-born artist was, in the early 20th century, a prolific painter of boats, decks, harbours and seascapes. Relatively unknown today, an astonishing 1,058 of his works are in public collections, the vast majority owned by the National Maritime Museum but also five in the Laing art gallery collection in Newcastle.

The database already has lots of tags and stories to make searching easier. The parrot enthusiast, for example, could find 61 works, from Tiepolo’s A Young Woman with a Macaw in the Ashmolean’s collection in Oxford, to Maggi Hambling’s untitled portrait of a man and his parrot owned by Southampton city art gallery.

Ellis said they might also ask artists and celebrities to create online shows. “We could, for example, ask Jarvis Cocker to choose his favourite paintings in Sheffield.”

The curation tool is being funded by the Ampersand Foundation and is the latest step for a small charity with big ambitions.

Art from 3,300 collection venues by 45,000 artists is on the database. The current big project is adding every sculpture, with around 16,000 already on it, and Ellis hopes to have all 80,000 by the end of the year. Fortunately, most of the photography has already been done.

The exercise has allowed Art UK to highlight fascinating stories behind many artworks.

For example, this week there was the centenary of the public unveiling of a sculpture of a woman who was a hugely well known in her day, less so now.

The sculpture of nurse Edith Cavell stands opposite the National Portrait Gallery in London, made by the leading British sculptor Sir George Frampton, and bears her famous words: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.”

Cavell was a nurse during the first world war who cared for countless soldiers regardless of their nationality. While helping allied soldiers flee occupied Belgium she was captured by the Germans. Despite an international outcry for her release, Cavell was shot at dawn by a firing squad.

It provoked outrage in Britain, with the Manchester Guardian headlining the story: “Merciless Execution of Nurse Cavell.” Her story was used in British propaganda to galvanise public opinion, with the recruitment of soldiers rising from 5,000 a week to 10,000 after her death.

It also inspired numerous artworks, with paintings in the Wellcome Collection and the Imperial War Museum.