AND TO THINK BARACK OBAMA ACTED AS IF ART HISTORY IS USELESS: Off the Beat and Into a Museum: Art Helps Police Officers Learn to Look. “To teach people how to notice details they might otherwise miss, Amy E. Herman, an expert in visual perception, likes to take them to museums and get them to look at the art. Recently she escorted a group of New York City police officers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and asked them to describe some of the things they saw. . . . A painting has many functions. It’s a cultural artifact, an aesthetic object, an insight into a time and a place, a piece of commerce. To Ms. Herman, it’s also an invaluable repository of visual detail that can help shed light on, say, how to approach a murder scene.”

As Virginia Postrel noted, Art History requires the mastery of a lot of visual information, and places a lot of emphasis on accurate, formal description of images. That said, Obama had a point on the undervaluing of skilled trades.