‘Boring’ Gormley rages at ‘crap’ art

Who's the 'crap' artist - Antony Gormley or those who have been trying to emulate his success with his monumental Angel of the North? Gormley chose the launch on Wednesday of new work at London's White Cube Gallery to tell the Independent what he thinks of modern public artworks in Britain. "On the whole," he says, "we have not reinvented the statue very convincingly for the 21st century," adding: "There is an awful lot of crap out there."

He says the success of his 65ft Angel has inadvertently set a precedent for the proliferation of "unchallenging" works. He singles out for criticism The Meeting Place - the much-maligned statue of two lovers embracing at the new St Pancras station - and the statue of Churchill and Roosevelt sitting on a park bench on Bond Street.

A lack of creativity is his bugbear. "A lot of public art is gunge, an excuse which says, 'We're terribly sorry to have built this senseless glass and steel tower but here is this 20-foot bronze cat'," he says.

Yet on the same day his scathing remarks appear in the Independent, over at the Daily Telegraph, art critic Richard Dorment is giving Gormley a taste of his own medicine. While not using the word 'crap', he might as well have done. Describing one of the new works at the White Cube, Firmament, Dorment writes: "As so often with Gormley, the work manages to be both portentous and empty, art that screams its own importance, yet boils down to a single, very small thought."

As for Lost Horizons, a collection of 32 iron figures based on casts of the artist's own body, Dorment accuses the sculptor of having had only one idea and making it last 22 years. "I've always been ambivalent about Gormley's work. Without much liking it, I've tried to respect it... But this show is so cynical in its assumption that the public is too dumb to notice how repetitive this work is, that I give up.

"Gormley's been boring us all for far too long. It's time he gave it a rest."