You think the human history of art is a scam? Have you considered that you don't know the first thing about art history and would have to go back to cave dwellers' paintings to even have the first idea about what art is?

I think understanding "what art is" comes from the experience of creating for the sake of creation, not so much from observing what has been made. It's different from knowing the history of art, which just gives you contextual perspective. That's valuable, but like with any history, there are narratives that survive and don't, there's context that gets lost. So a kind of orthodoxy arises around how you are supposed to view art according to the imperfect historical context that survived. It's not "a scam" but there's also no immaculate history; we get what the stewards of history choose to give us, within their ability to do so.

The thing with art history is it isn't made up ex post facto.

Throughout art history, at different levels of abstraction (individuals, schools, countries, philosophies), there is a constant and real conversation going on. A big part of art history (like any history) is finding out what that was at the time. Along with analyzing things ex post facto and coming up with ideas and narratives given our knowledge of all history.

I think you're making some incorrect, bold claims about art in an effort to simultaneously defend all artists and insult all engineers.

You don't need to "go back to cave dweller's paintings to even have the first idea about what art is", you just need to look at some art. Lots of art can evoke emotion in people with no background in art history, just like lots of food and drink can please people with no background in culinary history. There's a narrow subset, though, that can more or less only be appreciated by people who know the history. I don't think that subset is uniquely important. In fact, I think it belongs at the periphery of art.

An artistic subculture where the majority of attention is on works that don't do anything except deconstruct their mediums--works whose appreciation depends wholly on a socio-political understanding of the artist--is not a subculture I'm very interested in. And I don't think that makes me a dismissive, overly-analytic engineer. Quite the opposite! I think it's those who obsess over history and context instead of content that have lost themselves to analytics. Pure content-appreciation is our primitive, natural instinct.