Art History and un-science

Why is there such a confusion in my mind as to what the course I should be studying actually wants to be?
It's not Art Philosophy in its strictest sense, but it has that ambition. It is not Art Appreciation but masquerades as it. It's supposed to be an introduction to Image Analysis but its being confused with the other three kinds of Aesthetics.
Is it Post Modernist teaching rehashed, reheated and served all over again? Should I be worried why I find reading fourty year old articles inaccurate and outdated?
Colour photography will change the way we look at things.
Thank you 1970's Captain Obvious.
Why do I find it so hard to have to read articles that condemn academics trying to do historical accurate research without having to add their own opinion on everything. Why is not being interested in gender studies a big deal? Why does every article in my reader have to start with Plato's bleedin' cave or chair analogy? Why is Plato all of a sudden an authority on art? Just because he said some random things about it?
It probably all just boils down to name-dropping and citing irrelevant bits of other academics talking about Plato or Socrates. We are talking about people who thought Greek Tragedies was bad karma. But of course Plato apologists just add a an introduction note to his works saying his theory of art was probably never meant to be taken seriously.
How very un-sciency this all has turned out to be.
This is just a few reasons why Art History will haunt the realm of the humanities, or the wannabe sciences as I sometimes call them. Dare I say psuedo-science? It is clouded with half baked theories, polluted with uninteresting lines of thought and irrelevant facts and riddled with too much speculation.
How I loathe the ifs and maybes. I want facts dammit!