Put a smile on your face

Creed is usually referred to as a member of the Young British Artist pack, largely because he was showing in the East End of London at roughly the same time as Hirst, Emin, Lucas et al. At 35, however, he is younger than most of them ("kind of like the next generation"), and, at 17, left Glasgow to study at The Slade rather than Goldsmiths, the traditional alma mater of the YBAs.

Charles Saatchi has bought only one of his works (and since given it away to the Arts Council), but Creed has built a solid international reputation without such glitzy patronage. He makes enough money from art to sustain a flat in Shoreditch and a place on Alicudi, a tiny Italian island near Sicily, which he shares with his former girlfriend, artist Paola Piva.

To the public, of course, he is primarily famous for the fun tabloid newspapers have had at his expense. The Sun once produced a step-by-step guide to making your own crumpled ball of paper and sticking your own artwork Blu-Tack to your bedroom wall, a stunt that might have insulted a more fragile ego. But Creed insists he took no offence.

"I thought the crumpled ball of paper was really funny," he says. "Actually, I thought it was a more intelligent sort of criticism of the

work than many others I'd read. It was having fun and it was studying the process of making the piece.

"I can see why people think it's a piss-take, but I think my work is very traditional. I'm trying to solve problems of composition and form."

The shop at the ICA used to sell Creed's crumpled balls of paper (Work No 88 - he often numbers rather than names his pieces) for £10, with a signed certificate guaranteeing their authenticity, and it amuses Creed that you can buy crumpled ball "fakes" on the internet for $100. Essentially, of course, that $100 is buying you a sheet of A4 paper. Doesn't that strike him as odd?

"People buy Nike trainers that cost 50p to make for $100," he says. "The value of things, from property to art, is given to them by people and has nothing to do with the quality or otherwise of the object. Nothing has an intrinsic value."

FOR the ICA show, Creed chose Warhol's Vesuvius because its colours reminded him of an icecream. He compares Warhol to Mozart, another favourite artist. "They both give you the means to find depth in their work without working too hard at it," he says, struggling to explain. "I mean, it seems to me they're both beautifully shallow, they both play about with the surface, but that there's depth there, too ..."

Creed will show a selection of new work this autumn at Hauser & Wirth, the gallery that represents him, in Piccadilly. A highlight will be Work No 295, Smiling People, a series of blown-up snapshots of grinning faces arranged in quartets, to which the viewer's immediate reaction is to

smile right back. The images are similar in feelgood effect to the neon signs that Creed made in 1999 reading, simply, Everything Is Going to Be Alright and Don't Worry, both of which were displayed publicly - the former on a neo-classical façade in Hackney and the latter in a hospital canteen. The sign in Hackney was only supposed to stay up for six months, but people didn't want it to go, so its life was prolonged by another six months. Now Creed has made a new neon sign, "Feelings".

Why feelings? He looks at me in astonishment. "What do you mean, why feelings?" Well, why not another word? Why feelings? "But feelings are so important - gosh, what a strange question."

There is just no point trying to explain Creed's art in words. It means whatever the viewer wants it to mean, on one level deeply philosophical and on another, utterly superficial. And that, as far as anyone can express it, is what the delightfully bonkers Martin Creed is all about.

Artists Favourites Act II is at the ICA, SW1 (020 7930 3647) until 5 September . Martin Creed's new work goes on show at Hauser & Wirth, W1 (020 7287 2300) 8-30 October.