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Okay, the Olympics have finished, but imagine for a moment they have not and you are in the arena, watching the final of the heavyweight championship of culture — an almighty scrap involving two of the world’s most notable art forms. In the red corner, we have painting — glamorous, agile, flashy, famous and covered with bling. In the blue corner, there is sculpture — big, honest, tough, muscular and experienced. Who would you pick to win? Who, in the end, deserves to be recognised as the more important art form?

Painting would probably take the first round with its showy sidesteps and smooth moves. Backed by Roman Abramovich (who recently began investing heavily in the kid, alongside a consortium of Chinese, Indian and now Brazilian backers), this new boy on the culture block (oil paints were invented only 600 years ago) would skip hither and thither, jabbing skimmy punches into sculpture’s worn and wrinkled face.

Sculpture, meanwhile, would plod on relentlessly, as it has done since the beginning of time, caring little about the odd slap because it has been through a lot worse so often before. After all, there has never been a period in human history when sculpture was not there. Indeed, there isn’t an inhabited place on earth that does not have a sculptural tradition of some sort to celebrate.

As painting’s flashy slaps rain in on it, sculpture ignores them. It is used to being pulled off pediments and having chunks broken off it. Why, it can even get by without any arms. By the end of round two, the referee is forced to step in and stop the fight because painting has slumped to the canvas in a messy, abstract-expressionist heap, utterly exhausted and unable to continue. It was no contest. Sculpture wiped the floor with the young pretender.

Another good programme to watch on television if you need to be reminded of the importance of sculpture is the news. When Trevor McDonald emphasises sculpture’s criticality on News at Ten — as he often does — you are more likely to listen than if you hear me banging on about it in my new series. I am obviously partisan, and you, perhaps, don’t do the arts. Sir Trevor, on the other hand, is the voice of the truth, right? Yet see how many newsy occasions there have recently been when he has had to deal with sculpture’s international significance. For instance, the Taliban’s barbarous decision to blow up the world’s largest statue, the Buddha of Bamiyan, is a television spectacle I will never forget. The Islamist loonies even had the nerve to ensure a cameraman was on hand to record them doing it.

Wind forward a few years to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and those extraordinary images of Saddam’s statue being hauled from its plinth and dragged across Baghdad by screaming Iraqis will surely press into your thoughts. I still remember the scary hatred in the eyes of these contemporary Roundheads as they danced and trampled on Saddam’s badly sculpted face. When the Berlin Wall came down, Sir Trevor was on hand again to describe the anger being vented on statues of Lenin all the way across the former communist world. There are even those — and I would count myself among them — who remember 9/11 as a sculptural event, in which two sleek totems of architectural minimalism were reduced to rubble by the ultimate act of fiery, philistine iconoclasm. The fact is, no other art form has been as intimately involved in the international unravelling of humanity. The news reminds us constantly of the unique relationship that sculpture has to our history.

For the past year or so, I’ve been making a television series on exactly this subject. It’s not that I am against painting or anything stupid like that, but I do feel that a regrettable confusion of values has somehow pushed painting ahead of sculpture in the global weigh-in. The Monopoly cash being spent on paintings by Abramovich and his pals is silly money in any currency, but its perversity is heightened by the fact that it is being spent on the wrong product. If it were being spent on ancient sculpture from Mesopotamia, then at least some proper and adult values would be being reflected.

Mind you, at various points I found myself wishing I had kept my mouth shut on this topic and stayed at home with my paintings, because one of the chief characteristics of sculpture is the uniquely impactful relationship it shares with its surroundings. Sculpture can be just as portable as painting, and often has been. But it usually chooses not to be. If you wish to gather proof of the potency of sculpture by seeing the remnants of the great Buddha the Taliban blew up, you need to brave war zones and go to Bamiyan. If you want to see sculpture being hewn out of mountains to create a society, then attacked violently for failing that society, you have to voyage to the most remote island on earth: Easter Island. Sculpture and short cuts don’t go together. There is no easy way to carve stone or whittle wood or mould clay or build Stonehenge. Sculpture demands an effort from all the parties involved that we seem no longer to appreciate. Indeed, one of the reasons why the great messages of sculpture are so regularly lost on us is surely because we have become a pop-out-and-buy society that no longer remembers the deep pleasure of making things with our hands.

The other point I want to make in the series is that all this extra effort and extra urgency give sculpture an extra potency. Voodoo masters and witch doctors do not stick pins into paintings: they stick them into sculptures. For a very good and ancient reason: sculpture has a power other art forms do not. The relationship it has with the human body is uniquely visceral and edgy. The fact that it occupies the same space as we do gives it a magical presence a painting cannot match. When I say sculpture has a long history, I mean a long history. According to the Bible, you are a sculpture, and so am I. Both of us are the descendants of the first man, Adam, whom God fashioned out of a lump of clay the day after he finished making the Earth. God patted the clay into a likeness of himself, and voilà: a human. The first female, Eve, was a sculpture, too. God thought Adam looked lonely, so he took one of his ribs and made a woman. Eve, therefore, was more of an assemblage. But that is still a sculpture. And we, her descendants, are still mini-sculptures.

What is significant here is not the fact that our ancestors made up these charming nonsenses to explain their origins, but that they chose to imagine those origins in such strongly sculptural terms. The Bible sees Adam as a divine work of sculpture, and this is something we need reminding of outside the dotty confines of a creationist schooling. The best place in Britain to see important sculpture that was created to do important things is the British Museum, which is packed to the rafters with the stuff.

Since sculpture has never had a Dark Age — and has never not been made — and because every society everywhere has always produced it, the BM has no more chance of covering the entire history of sculpture in its displays than I have in my short television series. But it has a go. Personally, I would love the museum to mount a display devoted to the colour of ancient sculpture that revealed how the Elgin Marbles were originally brightly painted. If the Elgin Marbles were as they should be, it would be so much easier to recognise the similarity that exists between them and, say, the African tribal sculpture from which they were descended.

That is the thing about sculpture: it is the product of the international family of man, the Esperanto of the arts. The BM has at least allowed me to import some contemporary sculpture into the place, to bring its story up to date, and in October you will be able to see various modern interventions being made around the museum in a show, Statuephilia. Watch out for a life-sized Kate Moss, sculpted in gold by Marc Quinn, taking her place among the Venuses, and a cabinet full of painted skulls added to the Enlightenment Gallery by Damien Hirst.

The Sculpture Diaries, 7pm, tonight, Channel 4; Statuephilia, British Museum, WC1, October 4-January 25, 2009

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