Why the world doesn't need an Annie Warhol or a Francine Bacon

Yours for five francs ... a detail from Orlan's The Kiss of the Artist, part of the Pompidou's women-only show. Photograph: ADAGP, Paris 2009

In May last year, the Centre Pompidou consigned to storage nearly all its works by male artists and ­rehung its permanent collection to show only works by women. Camille Morineau, the curator of elles@centrepompidou, said the show was "going to be dramatic in a big way". It wasn't. The art press simply ­ignored it. The Guardian was one of few newspapers to ask itself the ­question: "Is the art world finally taking work created by women seriously?"

British galleries are less, not more, interested in women's work than French ones. The National Gallery owns ­paintings by only 10 women, of whom only four have been deemed worthy of representation in the main galleries, where you will find one Rachel Ruysch, one Berthe Morisot, and two paintings each by Vigée-Le Brun and Catherina van Hemessen. The rest, with the ­exception of Rosa Bonheur, can be found in Room A, the study collection, which is open for three and a half hours on Wednesday afternoons.

The Centre Pompidou, popularly known as Beaubourg and officially as the Musée National d'Art Moderne, houses works dating from 1905. ­Morineau was quoted as saying that until now there were not enough works by women in the collection to have been able to mount anything on the scale of elles@centrepompidou. After five years of a deliberate policy of spending 40% of the acquisitions budget on them, works by women now account for 17% of the permanent collection. This ­compares with the 13% of female artists in the Tate collections.

The exhibition takes up the fourth floor of the vast building, plus odd rooms on the fifth. The entrance is ­signalled by a purple panel, on which have been mounted large buttons of different colours; 11 bear the feminised name of a well-known male artist, Annie Warhol, Francine Bacon etc. The 12th bears the name Louis Bourgeois. Though this jeu d'esprit, by Agnès Thurnauer, has its admirers, it is after all feeble. Does anyone really think that Martin Kippenberger could have been Martine Kippenberger?

The storm of words that accompanies the exhibition stresses that its intention is to restore women to their rightful place in art history, as if there was a vast mass of wonderful work by women artists just waiting to be brought to light. The exhibition has been treated as a journey of discovery of works that have been forgotten or lost, but many, including the best of them, are stupefyingly familiar. Some major artists have been sampled in a fashion that seems positively flippant. Jenny Holzer's 26 Inflammatory Essays have been reduced to eight, replicated and mounted on a partition in uniform stripes from ceiling to floor, like cheap wallpaper.

Eva Hesse is represented by Untitled (1970), a seven-part sculpture made of fibreglass and polyester resin over polyethylene sheeting and aluminium wire. When it was made, the 34-year-old artist was dying. She never saw the finished work, which differs significantly from her model. The book published to accompany the exhibition claims that the piece was bought by the Centre Pompidou in 1986, other sources that it was presented to the museum by Mr and Mrs W Ganz. Time and poor conservation have reduced it to a sticky mess.

Some of the younger women ­artists in the show may turn out to be ­discoveries, but too many of them are ­making the kinds of female body art that have been doing the rounds for years. Innocents may be excited by Sigalit Landau's Barbed Hula of 2001, a video showing her full-frontal naked doing the hula with a hoop made of barbed wire, but only if they were too young to see Marina Abramowic´ slicing into her naked belly in the 1970s, or Orlan on the operating table in the 1990s. Later this year, Abramowic´ will be performing throughout her planned retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The life's work of Nancy Spero, poorly represented in this exhibition, will be celebrated at the Centre Pompidou. Both shows will be more rewarding experiences than elles@centrepompidou.

The effect of offering a sampler of the work of 200 women is to diminish the achievement of all of them. By lumping the major with the minor, and by showing only minor works of major figures, elles@centrepompidou managed to convince too many visitors to the exhibition that there was such a thing as women's art and that women artists were going nowhere. Wrong, on both counts.