A museum is paying six "interpreters" £5,000 each to set up an exhibition about love and courtship.

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery is calling the £140,000 project Rules of Attraction after the 2003 teen film.

It aims to attract people who never go to museums with its contemporary themes including a show about the little black dress.

Members of the public will be hired at £5,000 each to dig out saucy and romantic nuggets about Brighton and Hove from the museum's collections to be exhibited on Valentine's Day next year.

The Government is providing £100,000 for the project while just £24,000 comes from the museum's own funds.

But Brian Oxley, leader of the council's Conservatives, questioned the prudence of spending the money at a time when the council was preparing to make major cuts in services such as adult social care.

He said: "I am not against cultural things. Hove Museum is in my ward and I go there a lot. I just think people might wonder why this sort of money is being spent on this when all the time people are being told there isn't money for other things.

"The council is probably going to be making millions of pounds of cuts in a few weeks' time."

A job advert posted this week on Brighton and Hove City Council's website said applicants need no experience of working in a museum.

It reads: "Our city has long played a special role in courtship from George IV's pleasure palace - to the dirty weekend, from rutting to reproduction. We hope to use this universally appealing theme to encourage new visitors to the museum and to challenge our existing ones."

In the first few hours of the advert going up on Thursday there were seven inquiries. The jobs are open to anyone across the country, although the museum would like to employ some with a local connection.

Sarah Posey, head of collections and interpretations, said: "We are looking for anybody and everybody.

We want to attract people who don't normally come to museums or have a research link with museums. We want as broad a range of people to apply as possible.

"It doesn't have to be people who will submit written findings.

It could be dancers, rap artists, musicians, poets or performance artists."

The programme will run for a year and might include stunts such as ballroom dancing. The museum has never before attempted an external project on this scale.

Ms Posey said: "We are terribly excited about it. For us the process is as important as the outcome. It will be a learning exercise for us.

We look forward to taking on the results."

Museum staff came up with the idea after holding focus groups with people in the C2DE economic bracket from across the city, aged 18 to 24 and over 65.

Janita Bagshawe, head of museums and the Royal Pavilion, said they were looking for outsiders to breathe new life into existing collections.

She said: "It has got to be a fresh pair of eyes on how we do things, someone to look at things not through a museum curator's eyes. It is about how we get different people to use the museum."

She said £100,000 came from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's Designation Challenge Fund, which helps museums highlight collections of national significance.

  • Do you think the money is being well spent on this project? Email rachel.pegg@theargus.co.uk or tell us what you think by adding your comments below.