same thing but with tags

is it possible to apply the same function to tags and have them coincide with the taxonomy for posts, the same way it works with categories? I have a site for an artist. she has posts for exhibitions of her work and then image files of individual artwork pieces. exhibition posts are categorized as exhibitions, and I would like to be able to tag artwork based on subject matter and medium, and ideally the tag feed would display both post types for artwork media files and exhibition posts that have the same tags assigned to them.