Without pausing for breath, Paglia babbles on about Mondrian's unsuccessful attempts at dating ("His courtly but detached manner put women off," she confides, as if she were his exasperated mother) and then dashes off in pursuit of Impressionism, Japanese art, Futurism, Dada and Russian Constructivism. When at long last she remembers the painting, she barely throws it a glance before likening it to Mark Rothko. It's all noise and no illumination, stripping Mondrian's painting of any innate presence and merely using it as a prop for self-aggrandising yada yada yada. 

We reach the crowning glory of gushy, gossipy banality in the chapter devoted to Tamara de Lempicka's Portrait of Doctor Boucard. Not content with telling us that Boucard was once snapped dancing the tango with a "peppy" woman called Bibi, Paglia suddenly interjects that his yacht, the Lacteol III, was later owned by actor Peter Ustinov. Who on earth cares? I pity the honest, diligent student bamboozled into believing that the contemplation of great art compels one to spew out great torrents of glib cultural references, when this is nothing more than the path to superficiality, intellectual sterility and profound spiritual emptiness. 

If "focus" really were the core of this book, then it would be radically different. Every chapter would begin with the image at hand. We would be led to consider line, colour, symmetry, contrast and mood. We would be encouraged to pay attention to facial expressions, quirks of gesture, the rhythm of clothes-and we'd be given the confidence to respond to what we see in the light of our own experience. 

At this point, we would begin to move from the perceptual to the conceptual. Only then would we place our tentative interpretation within the frame of art history, learn of the struggles of the artist, and reflect on how the meaning of the artwork deepens as we muse on it over time. This is when the conceptual becomes the spiritual, when our initial emotional and rational conclusions are lived, tested, confirmed or transformed-sometimes in days, sometimes over decades. This is how the see-er and the seen merge and re-emerge, to be charged and changed forever. 

If you want an introduction to art, please don't be seduced by Paglia's flighty book of fragments, which is the splintered mirror-image of the "swirling barrage of disconnected data" she decries. For chronology, read E.H. Gombrich's Story of Art. For beauty, read Kenneth Clark's The Nude. For a passionate, highly personal and witty attack on the debased standards of modern artists, Brian Sewell's Naked Emperors is an outrageous delight from start to finish. 

But where should you go for contemplation? Download Walter Pater's Renaissance to your Kindle and commit his astonished perceptions of Botticelli, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci to memory. Yes, to "burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life". Not yakking about Peter Ustinov's yacht.