Cast it from the mind

Listening to Antony Gormley - the author of some of the ugliest and most simple-minded statues in the history of British art - complain about "crap" public art this week, I felt that a new world record had been set - simultaneously - for blitheness, vanity and hypocrisy.

The success of Gormley is one of the great unsolved mysteries of our times, and his new exhibition doesn't shed any fresh light on this riddle.

Here we have all the worst qualities of contemporary art compressed into two neat white rectangles of gallery space: repetition, sentimentality, glibness, banality and grandiosity.

In the basement the artist presents a version of the second of the only two ideas he has ever had - overblown CAD (computer-assisted design) romanticism.

An enormous, towering and sprawling Meccano-like metal lattice in the shape of a crouching figure fills the space, as if imprisoned there, like William Blake's Nebuchadnezzar or the Greek god Atlas holding up the gallery, instead of the world.

Whatever, it's a symbol of suffering of staggering naffness - a hi-tech super-sized mythological lowest common denominator. One looks up at it and feels overwhelmed by being underwhelmed.

Upstairs, Gormley has plastered the ceiling, walls and floor of the gallery with the usual suspects, 30-odd casts of his body.

The problem is not the repetitiveness of this work, but its superficiality. The art of Gormley, like scores of other artists of the past five decades (Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovic, even Giacometti), derives from serious, mostly French, ideas about our perception of the world through our bodies - yet Gormley's solipsistic blobs are the most uninspired, literal and obvious presentation of that idea ever formulated.

Following the philosophers' talk about the importance of the limits of the body, much art has been made which seems to allow the human body to do things it can't normally do - hence Gormley's "flying" figures predictably fixed to the walls and ceiling.

This is the philosophical equivalent of a colouring-in book. The guide points out that these casts were all taken over a two-day period.