When the time comes for the story of British art in the 1990s to be written, there will have to be a whole chapter on Michael Craig-Martin. Today he is a painter of household objects in acid colours. But it is his influence on younger artists that is extraordinary. As a tutor at Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s, he was acknowledged as an inspirational figure by Damien Hirst and other hardcore young British artists. He was also an influential Tate trustee throughout the 1990s and a key force in the creation of Tate Modern, for which he co-designed the purple light on top of the chimney. You could play a great art-world game called Six Degrees of Michael Craig-Martin.
So it's a surprise to discover, talking to him on the eve of his retirement as Millard professor at Goldsmiths, that far from expressing quiet contentment, he has serious anxieties about the state of the visual arts in Britain, or at least about the state of art education.
"The whole nature of education has changed dramatically in the past 15 to 20 years; this is true at every level of education and it certainly has had an impact on art education," he says.
What Craig-Martin worries about is an insidious growth in academicism. Artists have been drawn more than ever before into the university ethos, into certain patterns of activity and assessment that are associated with university education. All the models that are being used come from the academic world. People take PhDs in fine art; this is something that either didn't happen in the past or was at least very rare.
This academicism is the opposite of the approach that Craig-Martin is famous for. The Goldsmiths class of the late 1980s, which included Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Mat Collishaw, Gary Hume, Simon Patterson - all of whom appeared in the show Freeze, curated by Hirst when he was still a student - were about as far from academically oriented perpetual students as it is possible to be. They were openly ambitious. They wanted, and got, careers as artists. This was a result of the way they were taught. At Goldsmiths, teachers including Craig-Martin and Jon Thompson had developed since the 1970s a style of teaching geared to producing artists rather than art teachers.
"Our model was, what is the nature of the world into which they leave? What's expected of an artist? Is there an equivalent of a painting department out in the world, and the equivalent of a sculpture department out in the world? The answer is no." Now Goldsmiths is changing. The academics are taking over.
The next Millard professor will be Victor Burgin, an art theorist as well as an artist. Burgin makes photo-based artworks that are essentially illustrations of his academic writings. Despite coming from the same conceptual art generation of the 1970s - Craig-Martin acknowledges that it was Burgin who helped him get his first job at an art school - Burgin couldn't be further removed in his attitude to art. His artworks deconstruct Hitchcock, or stage cinematic scenarios with Lacanian subtexts.
Of academic practices generally, Craig-Martin says, "I feel uneasy about whether these formats are the ones that best enable people to have the kind of creative courage that's needed to be artists." Contemporary art, he says in a rather more relaxed way than Sir Nicholas Serota did in last week's Dimbleby Lecture, is in Britain to stay: the London art scene has an energy that is not going to go away. Nevertheless, he admits, "That energy there was at the beginning with that particular group of people, that's not easily repeatable."
This is something that is already affecting the art in galleries. More and more art, it seems, is being made with one eye on theory. Photo-based artists in particular, with the exception of Turner winner Wolfgang Tillmans, seem to be trying to conform to the writings of American academics such as Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster and others associated with the journal October. Some academics, complains Craig-Martin, "exercise an authority that would be considered shocking if they were artists". The October group see themselves as overturning the high modernist word of Clement Greenberg, champion of the abstract expressionists, in favour of a feminist and queer postmodernism. But they seem to have more of a stranglehold over art in America today than any high modernist critic ever had, as is obvious from the new displays at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The American critic David Hickey has blamed the rise of the museum and the academically minded curator for the crisis in American art. One thing never pointed out in gushing accounts of the success of British art in the 1990s is that it was made a lot easier by the suicide of the opposition. This was the decade in which American art's amazingly fertile, turbulent history spluttered and croaked. There has not been a single exciting new star in American art for more than a decade now.
So what Craig-Martin is saying is chilling, because what is happening here sounds like what has already happened there. American art was suffocated by the elevation of postmodern theory to an orthodox museum language, as notoriously manifested in the heavily politicised 1991 Whitney Biennial. Their loss was our opportunity: while American artists were squabbling about politics, Damien Hirst was sawing cows in half. Now it looks as if the miasma of theory is coming over here. It takes a distinctively British form, with the post-Hirst generation claiming to be more serious and politically aware than its predecessor. The magazine Art Monthly is full of piss-poor Marxist theory. Even the venerable journal New Left Review has got in on what is becoming a retro-1970s art scene. The rise of the curator is part of the same phenomenon.
No one describes better than Craig-Martin just what it was that was special about British art in the early 1990s, just how distinctive the art of Damien Hirst really is. Perhaps that is because of the depth of history he brings to it. Craig-Martin is anything but anti-intellectual. He just wears his knowledge lightly. Born in Dublin and brought up in Washington DC, he could not have had a more refined education. He studied art at Yale University, in a radical department shaped by the émigré Bauhaus teacher and artist Josef Albers. So he can claim a direct link to the art and design principles of the Bauhaus, the constructivist academy that flourished in Weimar Germany.
The Bauhaus preached a simple acceptance of modern forms, and Craig-Martin has been fascinated by objects since the 1960s. It was the moment of minimalist and conceptual art, when, as he remembers, "the question of what is art was one that artists thought about a lot. I suppose part of my interest in objects was why one object should be a work of art and another object not. How can you tell the difference?"
Craig-Martin came to Britain in 1966 to teach art in Bath, stayed on, and was invited to tutor at Goldsmiths in 1974. This was a time when artists did not expect to make money from their work, so being an artist almost inevitably meant being a teacher too. He continued his inquiry into what makes one object a work of art and another just a thing. His most famous joke on the mystery of objects was 1973's An Oak Tree, which consisted of a glass of water on a shelf and a text insisting that he had changed it into an oak tree without altering its appearance in any way.
"One of the things I wanted to do with the oak tree was to make something where the proof that it did happen was the same as the proof that it didn't happen, so that you couldn't conclusively say one way or the other. I suppose one of the things that intrigued me most - and it remains true in the drawings I do now - is that you can represent something with something that it doesn't look like."
Today he is best known for his paintings and wall drawings; he was invited to do a large wall painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this year to celebrate the museum's rehang of its collection. His paintings, which grew out of drawings very much in the clear-eyed spirit of Bauhaus design, are of mass- produced objects that he paints in a deliberately uninflected way, in non-representational colours, everything marked out in bold lines and perfect linear perspective, floating freely in space. They are paintings that make you wonder how things are connected, why this bunch of keys has come together with that umbrella.
It's probably the directness of his own art that enabled him to recognise the worth of Hirst and his contemporaries. "Right from the beginning they made work in the language of their time that made it possible for people to engage with it," says Craig-Martin. "People could understand what it was about. It was accessible work. It didn't have certain kinds of distancing things that were associated with high modernism."
There was something special about British art 10 years ago, but it is disappearing fast. Today the very success of Hirst and co in creating a London art world, a system of talk and activity around art, seems to be making the simplicity of their art less and less likely to be repeated. Michael Craig-Martin is only talking about art education, but you can already see the debilitating effects of academicism on art in London. Where we once had artists but no art world, we are in danger of getting an art world on the scale of Manhattan's without any real artists. Someone needs to come along with a cocky attitude and a chainsaw - with someone like Michael Craig-Martin to teach them.
Michael Craig-Martin's latest show opens at fig-1, 2-3 Fareham Street, London W1 (020-7734 9269), on December 12.
