KAWS: New Fiction, review: who wants to go to a gallery and stare at their phone?

And for his next trick, the artist known as KAWS brought augmented and virtual reality to the Serpentine.

KAWS (real name: Brian Donnelly) has come a long way since his days graffitiing the streets of New York in the 1990s. If his 3.8 million Instagram followers are any guide, he has become one of the world’s most famous artists.

A key part of his success has been an ability to straddle the worlds of fine art and commercial art simultaneously – by creating lines of toys, for example, or collaborating with fashion brands such as Dior, Uniqlo and Nike (for whom he designed a pair of Air Jordan trainers).

For his first major exhibition in London, KAWS has again done things with a twist. This time, a technological twist. The show features 25 colourful paintings and sculptures, each of them from the past dozen years and made in the artist’s trademark cartoonish style. (A typical KAWS figure has “X” shapes for eyes, cauliflower ears and owes its inspiration to a children’s TV character such as Mickey Mouse or the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.)

His imagery is frequently banal. However, the show does include a handful of semi-abstract pictures – a relatively new direction for him – where the viewer is lured into playing a fun game of seeking out KAWS’s subjects. In Silent City (2011) – a scene of urban chaos, capturing what might be the midst of an earthquake – we make out a pair of disembodied hands seeming to cling on to some sort of ledge.

So far, so normal. The techie stuff comes in two elements. By downloading an app called Acute Art and holding their phone in front of them, visitors can see a host of extra works on their camera screen: digital works which, by augmented reality (AR), appear to be part of the show.

Second of all, the entire exhibition is, for the length of its run, being replicated within the world of the popular online game, Fortnite. (Using an avatar, players are able to enter and look around the show in a digitally recreated Serpentine North gallery.)

Both elements are abject failures. Let’s deal with each one in turn. On the day I visited, total strangers could be heard asking each other “Have you got the app working?” Frequent answer: no. And even when the app did work, the AR pieces were hardly thrilling: they look little different from the physical ones. We’ve spent the best part of two years glued to our screens – who, when privileged enough to be in an art gallery, wants more?

As for the Fortnite collaboration, on the face of it, this may make sense: to give both artist and gallery greater exposure. The footfall for the average exhibition at this venue is 35,000, while the number of registered Fortnite accounts worldwide is 400 million.

However, it’s hard to see any player having a meaningful experience in the would-be exhibition. This is still, very obviously, an artificial environment, where the art works look like unconvincing imitations of KAWS’s originals. The “gallery” thus becomes a digital hang-out zone rather than a place to engage with art in any decent way.

How best to sum up the whole enterprise? Let’s call it a lost KAWS.

Until Feb 27. Tickets: 020 7402 6075; serpentinegalleries.org