I think of the National Gallery as a supremely tasteful place. It is a temple of high culture, revered around the world for its serious atmosphere and immaculate collection of European art. So what bizarre brainwave made its curators invite Maggi Hambling to put on an exhibition here?

Hambling is proof that you can be a well-known artist without having a soul, a brain or a good eye. She is a “painter”. Yeah, and I’m Rembrandt. People who hate conceptual art like to pretend that before the Turner prize came along, Britain was an arcadia of sensitive and skilled painters. Go and see Hambling’s daft daubs if you want proof of the emptiness of that claim. She is a painter all right, but neither sensitive nor skilled, nor imaginative, or anything else I value in art.

Celebrity is a British vice. It seems we’ve always had celebrity artists. When Holbein was painting, there was probably a hopeless artist with lots of personality making it big as court jester. And before Grayson Perry, there was Maggi Hambling – good on TV and rotten in the studio; a Grayson for the right.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maggi Hambling’s Walls of Water. Photograph: Linda Nylind

The loathsome thing about Hambling’s art is its total lack of integrity. She’ll try anything for effect. In her pretentious concoctions at the National Gallery there are Jackson Pollock drips, Van Gogh crows, Monet blurriness. All these gestures are pure pastiche. The paintings are lightweight – they actually feel physically slight, brittle and flimsy. The bright cascades of colour fail to evoke any of the force of the elements they claim to. These are, purportedly, romantic homages to wild seas and storms. But there’s not the least sense of nature’s power. She may as well add a bit of glitter, the paintings are so feebly decorative.

When Hambling paints the human figure the results look as if Rolf Harris were trying to paint like Francis Bacon. The Turneresque themes of these paintings are probably meant to be a “departure” for her. But by removing the props of portraiture and people, her foamy effulgences look all the more desperate.

What is art for? This is a question Hambling appears never to have asked herself. Her paintings are acts of egotistical imperialism, with no purpose except to claim space for themselves. It may not have been a great year for the Turner prize, and British conceptualism may be looking introspective and baffling, but after a dose of this nonsense I am ready to watch as much video art as the Tate can programme for me.