Jake Champan is nominated for this year's Turner Prize

Chapman, favourite for the Turner with brother Dinos, told Channel 4's Arts Show that Tate Modern was "a momument to absolute cultural saturation".

He also said Charles Saatchi's London gallery was "an expression of one man's ownership."

Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota also leads the Turner Prize's judges.

Chapman said: "You can see things at both the Saatchi and Tate Modern which are bending, swerving towards a kind of lowest common denominator which could have a very negative effect on the production of art itself."

He said Tate Modern, housed in a former power station by the River Thames, was "about parasitically adopting this old turbine factory so even from the outside it's demonstrating the shift from industrialisation to this kind of leisure time culture".

Chapman told the programme, due to air on 14 November, that the size of the building sent the wrong message.

'Sacred'

"You feel very small in the face of the magnitude of this cathedral - this is important, this is a sacred place," he said.

"Things that are sacred aren't questioned, and that's the problem."

The Chapman brothers' Sex is in the Turner exhibition

Chapman added "the idea of just ramming people up escalators" meant he would "rather go to Alton Towers and go on a theme park ride than look at some Rothko paintings".

The Chapman brothers' work currently features in its sister gallery, Tate Britain, along with other Turner nominees.

It includes a statue of a naked couple in a sex act, called Death, and a sculpture of bodies being eaten by maggots, called Sex.

He also said Charles Saatchi's new gallery at County Hall, which is showing an exhibition of the Chapmans' work, tried to "soften the blow for people who may be unfamiliar with the notion a work of art should not necessarily be pleasurable".

Chapman added the modern art collector should exhibit his entire collection, so it was "completely like a junk shop".

A Tate spokesman told The Observer newspaper that Chapman was "entitled to his view".