Most works of art that cause controversy are by their nature sensational. They are sexually graphic, or violent, or politically contentious. Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII is different. It is the most boring controversial artwork of all time.

Tonight BBC4 will rake over the boring controversy about these boring bricks one more boring time. But why? Bricks! (9pm, BBC4) is part of a season on conceptual art that has ranged from Vic Reeves on the Dadaists to a survey by James Fox. It’s all a bit naive, as if the programmers don’t know that Britain has been in the grip of conceptual art for some years now – ever heard of the Turner Prize? The most baffling idea, however, is to return once more to the 1976 debate about the Tate Gallery’s decision to buy Carl Andre’s “pile of bricks”.

One problem is that if you look in your Bluffer’s Guide to Modern Art you will find that Andre is a minimalist, not a conceptual artist: there is a difference. Conceptual art was a movement in the late 1960s and 1970s that replaced paintings and sculptures with ideas: the art object became a concept, something that could not be bought or sold because it was purely intellectual. Equivalent VIII is not immaterial in the way conceptual art aspired to be. It is as solid as brick. It is also as stupid as brick. If this is “idea art” (another term for conceptual art in the 1960s), tell me: what is the idea it embodies?

It is not immaterial in the way conceptual art aspired to be. It is as solid as brick. It is also as stupid as brick

Equivalent VIII is the very opposite of conceptual art. Instead of airily escaping the physical nature of art into a world of thought, it dumbly and relentlessly insists on its material reality – and nothing else. Being an arrangement of bricks is all this arrangement of bricks does or wants to do. It is brute fact. It is there. And that’s that.

Of course, I can see why the BBC thinks it’s worth revisiting the scandal in 1970s Britain when the Tate “spent taxpayers’ money” for a load of bricks. In fact the price paid was a princely £2,297. That modest sum didn’t stop the aesthetically conservative Burlington Magazine and a barrage of newspaper articles from attacking the Tate for wasting public money on “experimental art.” The controversy anticipated later arguments in Britain about Rachel Whiteread’s House, Damien Hirst’s vitrines, and Tracey Emin’s My Bed.

‘No-one should be made to look at it in a gallery’ … Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, at Tate Modern. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

I just wish the BBC had chosen to focus on one of those later rows – at least they were about interesting art. Sharks are fascinating. Bricks are not. The controversy was a debate about the value of modern art itself, that could equally well have had many other pieces of art as its provocation. Unfortunately, the work the scandal magnified is a dry and sterile object that the gallery bought for dry academic reasons. Equivalent VIII is a textbook illustration of minimal art that should stay in a textbook. No-one should be made to look at it in a gallery. While Donald Judd and Dan Flavin take minimalism to glorious heights of beauty, looking at Equivalent VIII is a bus ride to banality.

Better than bricks: Damien Hirst in front of his artwork The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

I’ve recently taught two Guardian Masterclasses at Tate Modern and, each time, Equivalent VIII was a crushing disappointment. It is a work of art that leads nowhere, that inspires nothing. (Nearby in Tate Modern’s Switch House you’ll find Rachel Whiteread’s green resin cast of a floor – a much more emotional, suggestive, spooky work of art.) I can’t believe we’re still talking about Equivalent VIII. The tragedy is that a long-ago 1970s row has made it somehow necessary for all good aesthetic liberals to defend this minor, pedantic, morose triviality.