Can a recommendation system be built without any user ratings? I was planning to make an artwork recommendation system as a project by using the WikiArt open source dataset available on kaggle, I'm still looking for datasets which might already have user ratings but is it possible to make a recommender without any user ratings? The dataset currently has these features. Any help or insight is appreciated. Thanks.
This is a common issue for recommender system refered to as cold start. You can look it up there are some solutions suggested out there but I have never tested them out. Have a look at this paper:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~mvolkovs/nips2017_deepcf.pdf