It was an on-off affair. When a flickering light installation by the artist Martin Creed was awarded the Turner Prize in 2001, half the world fell in love with it; the other half was appalled. Was it dodgy electrics or ground-breaking aesthetics? Wool-pulling swizz or subversive wit? No consensus was reached. But for what it’s worth – which could well be more than the undisclosed sum that was paid for it – New York’s Museum of Modern Art bought Creed’s Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Offa couple of years back.

Now this week Tate Britain announced that it has commissioned Creed to create a piece that will fill – or not fill – its famous Duveen Galleries. This is a controversial call. These stately spaces, custom-made for the display of sculpture, have accommodated anything from Rodin’s The Kiss through Sir Anthony Caro’s industrial constructions to Michael Landy’s recreation of an entire terraced house. Crowds have flocked to them to witness culture’s shifting fashions. But will they now be emptied? Rumour has it that Creed will merely get someone to dash through the space every minute or so.

Creed – Wakefield born (in 1968), Glasgow reared, Slade trained and now London based – is nothing if not confusing. He began as a painter but, undecided about what to depict, he stopped making objects and began creating “interventions”: things that made use of existing materials or situations rather than adding new stuff to the world. “I start from nothing and try to make something and at the same time try not to make it and get back to nothing again,” he explained in an interview with The Times. “It’s a great anxiety for me to create something extra for the world, because then I’ve got to live with it for the rest of my life.”

Creed, whose works now sell for tens of thousands of pounds, came to attention by scrunching up a sheet of A4 paper and putting it on a plinth, by sticking a blob of Blu-Tack to a wall, by leaving a stack of tiles next to a lavatory, by blowing up balloons. His work is Minimalist in mood – not that he would use the word Minimalism. He dislikes labels. His works are titled by numbers.

Some think that Creed’s No 401– a recording of nine minutes of the artist blowing raspberries – is a pretty accurate indicator of what he adds to our contemporary culture. But curators at the Tate are clearly not of that opinion. A few years ago one of his neon works – the whole world + the work = the whole world – ran across the top of the Millbank façade. Logic doesn’t really come into it. Creed wants his work to operate on an emotional level. He wants to connect, to communicate. Angry responses become as much a part of his pieces as confusion or pleasure.

Even as Creed sets out to short-circuit our choice-saturated culture, he opens up endless options. Once you have nothing, anything can happen. The Tate spreads its creed.

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