The Trafalgar Square “fourth plinth” project could hardly have got off to a better start. It was briefly — and obligingly — hijacked before its opening by an anti-smoking campaigner. His stunt set the tone. This project is supposed to offer a forum to the people of Britain, to let them speak of their concerns and interests, their everyday lives or their fantasies.

Antony Gormley, the artist and orchestrator, is essentially following a long tradition with this work. He is making a fundamentally descriptive piece. It sets out to portray a nation in much the same way as artists such as Reynolds or Gainsborough, Constable or Turner once did. Except where in the 18th or 19th centuries it was the ruling elite and the lovely landscapes they owned that summed up the essence of Britain, in our modern and rather more democratic era the ruling class is less important than the cross-section, the rolling acres less significant than their occupants.

And so, in a restlessly innovative artistic age, always eager, as the pioneering modernist Ezra Pound put it, to “make it new”, the public is turned into a sort of sculptural material. The techniques of reality TV are brought to focus on the world of fine art.

Passers through Trafalgar Square will find themselves pausing to stare at a succession of perfectly ordinary, if sometimes slightly eccentric, people as they scramble atop the plinth to stake their individual claim to our postwar culture’s proverbial 15 minutes of fame. This project is quintessentially populist. It promises to be phenomenally successful, in the same way that Big Brother has been: because it is so facile rather than because it is so profound.

But “any work of art which is not a discovery is of little worth”, Pound also said. So will we discover anything deeper from the fourth plinth project than this simple appeal to the lowest common denominator? Even asking such questions is part of the work’s point. The fourth plinth is as much about the debate that takes place around it as the artwork on top.

Gormley is an increasingly powerful presence on our art scene. Now he asks us to turn up our awareness a notch, to be more attentive, to consider the individuals who make up our society more closely. And, as so often, the setting is an important aspect of his work. What better place to encourage us to think about people than at the heart of the square that has become our capital’s meeting place?

But I fear that the focus remains too much on the artist. These “plinthers” may be individuals but there is a “god” who placed them in the world of his project. If we look because they are part of that, then we are not really appreciating them for their everyday ordinariness. The plinthers become living “gorms” (as Gormley’s life-sized clay figurines are nicknamed). And that undermines the entire purpose of the project: turns it away from a celebration of individuality into yet another adulation of celebrity.

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