<p>One year of French or German is not enough to be a masterful reader of the language. There really is no formulaic approach to the field.
And nothing in the art conservation is “as interesting as it sounds”. 
I was at UCLA when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there was no program called “experimental critical theory”. You have to understand that Art History departments are constantly reinventing themselves. At the time I was there, I studied with a loan formalist in a sea of Marxists. In fact a student is better off choosing a professor or approach to follow, rather than a generic system based on some arbitrary ranking. Find out what you want to do and what school is producing the newly minted graduates who are “doing it”.</p>