Barmy Barney

His leading champion, Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, likes to say that Barney has realised the sculptural qualitiesof film, but that's just art world selfinfatuation. In fact - thank God - the reverse is true: Barney is applying cinematic principles to visual art. He has effectively reimagined sculpture as bits of set design for a fantasy or sci-fi movie.

The Drawing Restraint sculptures at the Serpentine are huge but on the walls there are tiny intricate drawings that look like illustrations from a 19th-century edition of Edgar Allen Poe. In one, a male mermaid lies in a sarcophagus, his head is a skull.

In another room stands a green-tinged glass display table, which contains a series of translucent frames holding signature Barney artefacts: a sketch of an American football pitch, a squeeze or two of orange-coloured Vaseline. Over the top lies what looks like moss, but which turns out to be electrified nylon, a luminous green web arranged in the most deliberate and delicate rhythms across the contents of the table. Sure, it's an elaborate-framework for a few sketches, but while some contemporary artists have abandoned the framing of the work, in Barney the frame is at least 50 per cent of the piece. In his large two-tiered display cabinets, museological presentation has become an aesthetic. Its origins lie with the two Josephs, Beuys and Cornell, whose vitrines and boxes housed rusting machinery, first-aid boxes, dolls and curios. But Barney has replaced their preferred atmosphere of a dusty archeological museum with the glitter of an exhibition of the Crown Jewels.

At the time of Barney's 2002 Guggenheim show, which established him as a kind of American Damien Hirst, the rumour was that the Cremaster Cycle films were sold in editions of 10 at around a million bucks a piece. Barney's veteran New York gallerist, Barbara Gladstone, told me that she "never talks prices" but she did tell me that the Drawing Restraint videos weren't for sale at all. Instead Barney now sells the byproducts of these videos - the sculptures, drawings and photographs - to finance his films.

Anyone who can finance a movie from a few sculptures is at the top of the art market, yet, at auctions prices for his limited editions photographs vary wildly. The instantly recognised satyrs from the Cremaster can fetch up to £150,000, but you can still get a bargain on a Barney - some of his photos and beautiful mixed media reliefs go for under £10,000. It may be because his art is too wacko for the hedge-funders; more likely his gallery has successfully pursued a strategy to get the big pieces into museums or to collectors who wouldn't be interested in reselling them. In that sense he's outside the bubble. Barney doesn't require the cocaine of the auction market to stoke his fame, unlike his peer Hirst.

Barney's work nevertheless suffers from the extravagance and self-indulgence of the inflated contemporary art boom - almost every scene is filmed in lavish tracking crane shots. But, whatever the art world says, his videos aren't Hollywood. The trained eye of a filmmaker or cinematographer can see that the lighting's a bit flat, the shooting style somewhat wooden, and the acting's a little self-conscious - when Barney and Bjrk are on camera together they look uncomfortable, almost like they've just had a, well, barney. Sometimes the framing of the artwork is pompous, as if he wants to turn every smudge and squiggle into a holy relic. A negative-minded art critic could write him off as conceptual art's answer to Bilbo Baggins, the Cremaster a contemporary art reversioning of Lord of the Rings.

His work is certainly terribly po-faced. Even a moderate cynic is likely to snigger at some of his antics, but one must not chortle as the artist jumps up on to a child's trampoline so that the paint brush in his extended arm can leave a dab on the studio ceiling (Drawing Restraint 6, 1989). Nor should one snigger at the reverential way he has exhibited his scrawled drawings in lavish black cabinets, like the fragments of priceless Inca metalwork (Drawing Restraint 15, 2006). But there are two criticisms one cannot make of Barney's work: unlike most contemporary art, it cannot be called stupid or derivative.

The idea that underpins Drawing Restraint in its entirety illustrates Barney's intellectual and artistic achievement. We often hear the phrase that such and such a sport is an art form, but Barney has literally realised this, making the athletic challenge of making the work the subject of the work, in the same way that Jackson Pollock made the act of painting the subject of the painting. In his art he presents a new metaphysics, a new version of the idea that all things in the world have a Oneness.

The late 19th century was full of synaesthetic theories - music, architecture and painting were thought to be part of a whole. At that time syncretic images in paintings linked different civilisations: symbolists such as Gustave Moreau painted symbolic female figures which were a Greek muse, the Virgin Mary and an Indian princess. For Barney, who was deeply impressed by his experiences as a college football player, the structures and patterns of sport, art and nature reveal their inter-relatedness. The football pitch and the currents of ocean are like the circulatory system of the human body, opera houses are an architectural lung and we already talk about a ship's "intestines". No other artist before Barney had made this connection between sport and art - possibly because most artists are so weedy they don't play sport.

The Barney-Björk epic, made in 2005, and with Björk on the soundtrack, revealed a new obsession - whaling. Bravely embracing an activity that is just beyond the frontier of the permissible in our culture, whaling is depicted as a Herculean labour, a metaphor for man's drive to conquer the natural world but in which he is ultimately subsumed.

In the climax of Björk and Barney's whaling expedition, they nuzzle each other silently in a love scene, as Björk slices open Barney's stomach and dines on his flesh amid a rising tide of petroleum jelly and blood. It's a vision of heroic adventure, full of perversity, cruelty and tenderness.

Even if it's over-the-top, overpriced and over-long, Barney's work is strikingly intelligent and marvellously imaginative. That makes him one of the few artists working today whose work will be regarded with interest a hundred years from now.

Drawing Restraint is at the Serpentine Gallery (020 7402 6075, www.serpentinegallery.org) until 11 November. Admission free, daily 10am-6pm. His film Drawing Restraint 9 is at the Gate cinema, Notting Hill (0871 704 2058 www.picturehouses.co.uk), daily matinÈes 28 September-4 October and Sundays 7 October-11 November.