Art: a new history Paul Johnson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 777pp, £25 ISBN 0297829289

The first illustration in the writer and journalist Paul Johnson's tome shows a painting of bison on the walls of the Altamira cave, deep underground. One of the last is Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, sparkling in the sunlight. Johnson surveys the whole history of art in one grandiloquent sweep, from our darkest beginnings to our most glittering present; from Spain, around the world, and back to Spain again. It is a story bristling with personal opinions. Johnson admires the cave painters yet doesn't rate Gehry. But there is one manifestation of Spanish art that really bothers him: Pablo Picasso.

Johnson relates how, when he was a child, he wanted to be an artist, but his father, who was the head of an art school, told him: "I can see bad times coming for art. Frauds like Picasso will rule the roost for the next half-century. Do something else for a living." Paul obediently became a writer, and an extremely prolific one, but he has only now written a book about his first love - and first hate. It is as though he has been nurturing resentment against Picasso all his life. It bubbles like boiling venom beneath his generally friendly wander through the familiar story of art.

Picasso is the arch-priest of what Johnson calls "fashion art". It started in ancient Egypt with the pharaoh Akhenaten, who suffered "from the delusion that he was the incarnation of a new high god" and "worked out the canonical implications of his new fashion in theology, and imposed them on artists". At the end of the book, Johnson's bile gets the better of him. He tells us that "cubism can fairly be classified as the first major instance of fashion art", forgetting that he has already given that accolade to Akhenaten 600 pages earlier.

What links the art of Akhenaten to cubism? Apparently, for Johnson, a lack of skill in representation and a desire to disrupt. He rails against the "grotesque and revolting physical distortions" that can be seen in the pot-bellied depictions of the revolutionary pharaoh, ignoring scholarship that praises these representations for their truth to nature, and that this era produced what many considered the most beautiful portrait in the world - of Nefertiti, Akhenaten's wife.

Cubism is summarily dismissed: "It is likely that Braque produced the intellectual content - that is, the rationalisation that makes squared and linked planes in approximating colours a 'truer' representation of objects than the traditional verisimilitude of drawings, exact colours and scientific perspective. Picasso provided the rest of the kit, including the publicity." Johnson argues that what he calls "fashion" - the "desire for novelty, itself enhanced by the needs of commerce" - inevitably results in ugliness when it appears in art. This is the opposite to what one would have thought, because the whole aim of fashion is, surely, to create something that has the power to attract, not repel.

Those most seductive of attributes - beauty and skill - are, for Johnson, the sole essence of art. He believes it is these qualities that will ride back over the hill to save us from the horrors of the "fashion art" of Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin et al. Johnson's optimism is shaky because he does not tell us what he means by beauty and skill; he just presumes we will all recognise it when we see it.

Johnson is out of touch. He does not seem to have realised that the debate has gone way beyond whether a work of art is beautifully made or not. The situation is much more serious than he imagines: the craft of creating, upon which his whole theory of art is based, has itself been eclipsed.

As an art teacher's son, he attacks the self-taught and the amateur and, above all, the inspired monk wielding a brush in his cell. Artists may have "served God with varying degrees of devotion, but their service to their art was a more consistent element in their motivation". He goes further, and claims that "art is the oldest profession", older even than the other one.

He imagines the painters of Lascaux bustling between the cave, which he thinks was a sort of art gallery, and their studios, being paid handsomely for their labours and strutting about as "great men who gave themselves airs". There is no evidence to support this view. It is probable that these paintings were executed during secret rituals by men who were motivated by religion, not art. The idea that art could be of value in itself did not become widespread until very recently in the west.

Aesthetics has a much longer history in China. But this book is almost embarrassingly Eurocentric. Non-western art is introduced as and when the west discovered it - American after Columbus, Chinese after the Jesuits, the primitives after the moderns. Had these alternative traditions been given their rightful place in the story, Johnson would not have been able to assert so confidently that beauty and skilful representation are the sole aim of art.

Johnson paints watercolours - tentatively, at last, defying his father. His chapter on this medium makes bold claims. The English watercolour school, he says, "aroused a wide, and eventually global, interest in landscape as such". In fact, landscape painting reached separate peaks of achievement during the Roman empire, medieval Europe and, above all, in China centuries before Johnson's beloved John Sell Cotman lifted a brush. Johnson's special pleading for his chosen medium has, one cannot help thinking, a personal edge: watercolour, he writes, was "a means whereby good painters became superlative ones and the merely mediocre improved their performance beyond their dreams".

The freshest and most vivid descriptions are of buildings, such as the Pont du Gard in NImes (he is good on Roman concrete) and the Laurentian Library in Florence, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Taj Mahal. His favourites are the medieval cathedrals, which he considers "the greatest accomplishments of humanity in the whole theatre of art".

Johnson hopes his book will help art get back on track. He would like his tome to be, like the monumental arches of Durham Cathedral, both highly conservative and revolutionary. In fact, it fails to be either. It is too personal to become an authoritative text. Nor will it change things. Johnson is a lonely figure left paddling in a reedy oxbow lake, not realising the river has shifted course and moved on. His crucial mistake has been to go on listening to his father. Picasso was not a cynical manipulator of fashion but a genius who liberated the language of art so that it could express, once again, our deepest fears and highest hopes. Without his achievement, and those of his many great contemporaries, we could not hope to cut through the detritus that masquerades as art today.

Julian Spalding is the author of The Eclipse of Art: tackling the crisis in art today (Prestel Publishing)

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