Is Malcolm McLaren in danger of joining the ranks of Stephen Fry, Alan Bennett and the late Queen Mother by becoming a British national treasure? Thirty years ago, as svengali to the world's most notorious rock band the Sex Pistols, the very notion would have been unthinkable. But in an era gorging on nostalgia and starved of cultural authenticity the suggestion doesn't seem so out of place.

McLaren is the former partner of the designer Dame Vivienne Westwood; has presented his own much garlanded shows on the BBC, which once banned his band's records; appeared in a reality television programme (though declined I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!) and has been invited to perform his one-man evening of anecdotes and tall tales at the Royal Festival Hall and the Sydney Opera House after successfully premiering at this year's Edinburgh Festival. In 1999, he even toyed with the idea of being Mayor of London.

When I caught up with him he was busy at the Gateshead's Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts staging the world premier of his new film, Paris: Capitol of the 21st Century. Yet surprisingly for someone of McLaren's famously vaunting ego, the notion of being nationally treasured seems to be something that he has only half considered.

Dressed in an expensive-looking tweed suit and knotted grey scarf, looking more like a respectable don from one of the ancient universities than the man John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten once described as the "most evil person on earth", his voluble pronouncements were providing entertainment for those sitting in the restaurant of the Tyneside gallery. "I'm most probably a missing link that a lot of people don't know.

Someone has to tie the loose ends between the 60s and the 90s. That has been left open [to me] because no one is aware what artists had to face in the 70s," he says.

According to curators at the Baltic, he is an artist "whose time has come". The 63-year-old godfather of punk turned adopted Parisian lives in self-imposed exile with his American-Korean partner, Young Kim, 37.

Fresh from some acclaim for his "musical painting" sequence Shallow 1-21, a series of faded scenes taken from 60s home porn movies and set to music, his latest piece continues in much the same vein - a repetitive 62-minute appropriation of clips from a private archive of French television adverts and other "lost" films. Some of the - at times - amusing sequences were created by McLaren's artistic pin-ups such as Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp from early on in their career, when they were required to take on any work they were offered. It was this previously little-known episode in the history of art that fired McLaren's imagination and - it is hoped - will help secure his late-life credentials as a serious artist to be appreciated.

McLaren talks at length about the eight years he spent at art college in the 1960s and early 70s, an odyssey through outlying suburban institutions then largely unchanged since the 1930s and culminating in a three-year fine art course at Goldsmiths. Everything that followed his traumatic departure from art school, where he had been sheltering from the world of work as if it were a "dreadful disease", has been an expression of his art.