Michael Glover: Behind all the noise and brash ideas lies the banal trickery of a brainbox

For once the judges' favourite was also clearly the people's favourite, if we are to believe the comments board at the Tate gallery.

Yet the award of the Turner prize to Keith Tyson raises serious questions about the nature and direction of this perpetually controversial award. What sort of a creature is Tyson?

For a start, he is a Maximalist in an era still partially in hock to the aesthetics of Minimalism.

Tyson's is an exuberant, sprawling, noisy presence. He works not in one medium but several simultaneously. He makes giant paintings; suites of drawings; mad, unworkable machines. Nothing, it seems, is ever quite finished because everything is always in process.

To see Tyson's room at the Tate, which was, incidentally, very similar to Tyson's room at the Venice Biennale of 2001, was rather like seeing the lid lifted on a human brain in action. It was seething, colourful, contradictory, funny andnever short on describable content. The largest part of his show was the wall of 42 studio drawings. Drawings? Well, sort of. Some looked like the cartoon doodles of a half-baked inventor. They were pages ripped straight out of a working sketchbook of projects under consideration or projects that would perhaps never be realised.

One such example is Galactic Central Pointer, a painting of a finger post that, when suitably calibrated, will remain pointing at the Milky Way day and night.

Then there is the pair of paintings entitled Bubble Chambers: 2 Discrete Molecules of Simultaneity 2002, one of his most recent works. Here we have two near-identical paintings of floating, coloured bubbles of various sizes. They look like molecules that have drifted out of a school chemistry textbook. The bubbles are overlaid with captions, many of which are dated and timed. When the dates and times are the same on both paintings, the captions are always different: "5th July 11.23am, rattling a stick across railings"; "5th July 11.23am, the click whirr of a hard drive". What does all this amount to? It means Tyson is reminding us that we all inhabit parallel worlds of consciousness. We live beside each other, but separately, thinking different thoughts.

The pair of paintings represent the embodiment of a clever wheeze which, when reduced to a description such as this, strikes one as banal.

Tyson is guilty of this a lot. He has a big brain and lots of loudly voiced ideas about the "global totality of knowledge and language" but, taken together, the work seems emotionally thin, more the tricksy, adroit antics of some brainbox than art of any memorable substance.

Michael Glover