Michael Landy is the Holy Fool of the YBA generation, a charismatic barefoot friar urging the contemporary art world to give up its gaudy riches and embrace Our Holy Lady of Poverty – a Saint Francis of Assisi, in short, for the age of Conceptual Art.

Like Francis, Landy speaks with a sweet and smiling face as he preaches his subversive messages. Like Francis, who in the early years of the thirteenth century invented both Performance Art and Installation Art –having himself publicly scourged and crowned with thorns at Passiontide, then creating the first Christmas crib “to bring home to the people of Greccio what the birth of Christ at Bethlehem was like” – Landy both performs his beliefs and embodies them in the structure of staged mises-en-scenes.

In the course of Breakdown, of 2001, a project enabled by the aptly named Artangel Trust, Landy systematically and publicly destroyed every single one of his possessions: his clothes, his car, relics and mementoes given to him by his parents, as well as precious works of art given to him by old friends such as Gary Hume. As the artist performed that destruction of his own material existence, using the ground floor of Selfridges department store as his theatre, he evoked memories of Christ among the traders in the temple – and, yet again, the example of St Francis, called “another Christ” by his followers, who had announced his sense of spiritual vocation by renouncing all material possessions.

Make any of these comparisons to Landy and he will instantly deny them. He is a nonbeliever, he says, an Anglican by upbringing. But that only adds another link to the chain of evangelical associations stirred by his work. Take Landy’s latest and current project, the magniciently idiosyncratic Art Bin at South London Art Gallery. The work is an open invitation to artists everywhere to acknowledge their failures: a huge transparent skip. To it, painters, sculptors and others may commit their unsuccessful works, once vetted and approved by Landy as genuinely failed creative experiments. Gradually, the maelstrom of art wreckage, including failures by Landy himself, a skull painting by Damien Hirst and works by such other luminaries of British art such as Gillian Wearing, Tracey Emin and Peter Blake – although, strangely, nothing yet from Anish Kapoor, who might have contributed so much – has grown and swelled.

The Art Bin is a work of art – part performance, part installation – itself fashioned from works of art destroyed, rejected and annihilated. With it, Landy is remembering his Anglican roots, reconnecting with the vibrant and viciously iconoclastic relish in destruction that animated the radical founders of the Church of England. His new installation is a modern re-enactment of the “jolly musters” staged by Archbishop Latimer in the 1530s, those public bonfires made from hundreds of wooden of figures of Christ and the saints and prophets, that effectively destroyed the entire medieval traditions of British art. Landy does not want to destroy everything, and the art in his bin will be put to landfill rather than burned, but he is nonetheless working in the same vein of public spectacle.

Latimer wanted to destroy idolatry. Landy has a different target: the complacency of the contemporary art world, the market that drives it and the institutions that have conned themselves into believing the bizarre collective fantasy that all the works of all the supposedly “important” artists of today are good and serious and valuable. Is it really a coincidence that the architectonics of Landy’s skip, its glass and its black steel, have such a Tate Modern feel about them? Might he even be daring to suggest that Tate Modern itself contains much that might well be worth consigning to landfill?

If so, he is of course right: ninety-nine percent of today’s art is tomorrow’s refuse. But such is the power of institutions like Tate Modern, and such their reluctance to admit mistakes, that the traditional sifting of good from bad by posterity is being systematically blocked by the conservative cabals of their buyers and curators. Nowadays, long after the consensus of sensible sensitive critical opinion has indicated that such and such a big-name artist was actually – dare it be whispered – not that good, you can bet that his or her work will still be on display in the corruptibly conformist displays of most of the world’s contemporary art museums.

Worth is not the same thing as value, which especially in the art world has never been more manipulated – and manipulable – than it is now. Landy keeps saying this. Long may he continue to do so. Whether he cares to admit it or not, his own work has a deep core of integrity and draws on a deep well of unfashionably spiritual conviction. That is why he will probably never win the Turner Prize. It is also precisely why he himself will eventually be remembered as one of the truly exceptional, indeed truly great artists of our times.