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Nornagest comments on The Need for Universal Experience Classes - Less Wrong
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My knowledge of art history specifically is limited to a single college course, but I've been exposed to literary criticism in a little more depth. At least in that field, the predominant failure mode seems not to be postmodern babble (there's some of that in a lot of contemporary work, but it seems more in the nature of a stylistic tic than an actual fixture of thought) but what I might call promiscuous application: that is, readings of a work are decoupled from the needs of readers and writers generally and selected according to what looks fresh and interesting to the literary criticism community. This produces a lot of entertainingly hyperspecialized but ultimately sterile interpretations, a lot of ingroup pandering, and a lot of political grandstanding, but not -- as a fraction of the whole -- much insight into the actual mechanics of literature.
That's not to say that I've gotten nothing out of it; I have. But it tends to take a lot of digging.
Interesting comment and I do agree. I think it's only to be expected that in their research-level scholarship, literary critics/theorists are mostly talking amongst themselves (the same is the case with most academic specialties). But like you I've struggled to find interesting, accessible, eclectic/broadminded (i.e., not massively argument-driven, or as you put it "hyperspecialized") readings by legitimate experts that really enhance my enjoyment of (especially) difficult works without trying to draw me down a rabbit hole of topics that are only of interest to lit-theorists.
There is a strange and not obviously sensible blending of cultural theory and literary criticism in academia. So often you end up reading an analysis of a work that exists to illustrate someone's theory of culture rather than an analysis of a work that exists to illustrate important aspects of that work. Freud gets invoked far too often, too.