Camille Paglia is concerned about an entire generation of technology-savvy youngsters who know nothing about fine art.

The American social critic and provocateur who took on feminism with Sexual Personae and popular culture with Sex, Art and American Culture, turns to the visual art of the ages in her latest book, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars.

A followup to 2005’s Break, Burn, Blow, in which Paglia introduces the uninitiated to poetry, the new book probes the meaning of art and explores why images speak to us across the millennia. It was written as a “user friendly handbook” to introduce a generation to art criticism, she says.

Paglia dismisses most modern art and literature as lacking in passion and emotional intensity.

But as she tells CBC’s Nigel Hunt, she keeps a flame burning for George Lucas, whose Star Wars series has the sweep and ambition she admires in great art.