Wanna win the streaming wars? Get an art historian.

In an industry that combines artistic endeavor, business acumen, and a vested interest in audience motivation to make profit, art historians have what it takes to be entertainment and media warriors. They come to the battlefield of the streaming wars equipped with loads of strategies for visual and written storytelling, sourcing and interviewing talent, streamlining internal and external communication, and deriving insight from primary research on both content and consumers.

Sister Wendy slays the streaming wars.

Former president Barack Obama made headlines in 2014 when he dismissed art history as a field that failed to prepare college grads for the job market. Instead, he praised “skilled manufacturing or the trades” as the solution to the U.S.’s massive unemployment problem, because productive work only comes with a hard hat and a wrench, apparently. Obama later apologized for his comment, but memes circulating the Internet lately show that some Americans still agree with his worldview.

Politicians’ disdain for art history comes from a long track record of bad representation and gender bias. Everything from social media, to TV shows, to baby boomers (I’m looking at you, Grandma Ethel) pigeonhole art historians as “the girls with the pearls” – a sexist and patronizing catchphrase that conjures up images of rich White women clutching their pearls as they lecture about the “Great Masters” of the Italian Renaissance. Even those with less of a grudge against the field limit its cultural power to cocktail party trivia about Picasso and Pollock (remember cocktail parties? I hardly do, either!).

Far from being frivolous handmaids of elite culture in the U.S., art historians have all the tools at their disposal to be media and entertainment warriors. They are the only storytellers who treat artworks and images as prime sources of information about society. In a world inundated with social media, advertisements, and other audio-visual content, effectively communicating how something should look and why is paramount. Art historians can nail just the right symbol, spatial arrangement, color, or image pairing to cut through the visual noise and command a viewer’s attention – and imagination – for a sustained period of time.

Institutions like the Academy of Art University showcase the role art historians have played as consultants on major films and shows, such as The Crown, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Lincoln. These researchers made sure that costumes and artistic reproductions were historically accurate and enhanced the desired tone of the production.

As important as this consulting work is, people trained in art history can offer a lot more than encyclopedic knowledge for historical fiction.

The skills and work methods unique to art history provide untapped potential for the operational aspects of the entertainment industry: art historians are experts at pitching stories, talent, and marketing ideas; they can streamline communication between the numerous departments needed to make a show or film; and they regularly collect data about how people view and consume audio-visual material by researching archives and interviewing people in multiple languages. Imagine the cross-cultural insight and qualitative research methods that art historians can bring to the table to help network executives build global markets amidst the streaming wars!

In an industry that combines artistic endeavor, business acumen, and a vested interest in audience motivation to make profit, art historians can go above and beyond to deliver that trifecta of industry goodness. But let’s not limit ourselves to the rule of thirds.

Here are four ways that art history can strengthen the entertainment industry, from research, to development, to post-production: 1. Pitching screenplays and branding strategies. Whether promoting a script for an hour-long televised drama series or a brand that appeals to middle America, effective pitching is an essential tool for screenwriters and creative executives, as well as producers and marketers. Art historians are experts at creating a symbiosis between visual and verbal storytelling, which is the foundation of any effective pitch. They understand the impact that pictures, moving image, and sound have on audiences, including a board room of studio executives, who have to sit through a slew of pitches every day. Armed with the ability to sell the seed of a nascent creative project, an art historian can make an idea engaging and attractive without using distracting gimmicks or excessive props. Put it this way: if an art historian can make the story behind a decorative wooden door from medieval Cairo exciting to a room full of distracted 19-year-olds, she can make nearly any pitch treatment or brand strategy sexy to industry leaders (my previous life as a college professor taught me a lot about pitching ideas!).

2. Giving people jobs. When it comes to promoting human dexterity, art historians are seasoned translators for talent. They spend years learning about artists’ works, lives, and motivations. Artists express primarily through the senses (sight, sound, touch, and taste), and it is up to the art historian to synthesize their creative output into a compelling story for those who may not be artists themselves. She or he often takes it one step further in pitching an artist’s screenplay or acting skills by placing their creative work in context, ultimately demonstrating WHY they are so necessary and in demand right now.

Let’s look at the success of Mindy Kaling’s series Never Have I Ever, which released its second season on Netflix and just got green-lit for a Season 3. Today’s audiences are craving character-driven stories with young and relatable female leads. Viewers are also remarkably stressed out, looking for comedic relief from a never-ending flood of frightening news features and toxic social media exchanges about climate change, gun violence, and racial oppression. Never Have I Ever pulls us away from the din of our phones and laptops and, instead, immerses us in the world of a confused but hopeful Indian-American girl. While the protagonist’s voice highlights immigrant experiences in the U.S. the story delivers buckets of laughs about a universal human experience: coming-of-age and falling in love. This makes Mindy Kaling and her staff writers an indispensable resource for creating entertaining, relevant content.

3. Developing effective communication strategies. Armed with keen insight about the relationship between visual and story, and creator and viewer, art historians can be valuable communication strategists in post-production. This later phase is arguably one of the most important in the creation process for both film and television. To edit a feature or serialized work, you need a legion of editing producers, sound engineers, colorists, and CGI animators, to name a few, and you need them to share the same creative vision to work effectively and efficiently. Art historians can streamline communications between art departments, showrunners, technical departments, and production management because they understand just how important the final look, sound, and feel of a motion picture is for building consumer buy-in. Furthermore, art historians can take a director’s vision of tone and translate this effectively for colorists and cinematographers so that everyone is on the same page in the editing phase. In an industry where every minute of post-production costs big bucks, effective communication between departments, and between creators and executives, can deliver the project on time and keep it within budget.

4. Researching and analyzing consumers. After releasing that new half-hour dramedy, or the next interactive game from a comic book spin-off, networks and studios need researchers who love to dig and dish about audiences – what makes them tick? Why do they stop watching a particular show two episodes in? And are they saving the rest of that Ben & Jerry’s for the season finale of Hacks? (even audiences have to make tough decisions amidst the streaming wars...)

Art historians know how to do some serious sleuthing about viewers, and it’s all fueled by their insatiable curiosity about people. When I stayed in Egypt for a year to create a book-length research project, I slapped on my ethnographer hat and went to state art museums, asking visitors about which artworks they liked most, and why. I also wanted to know what their everyday lives were like, so that I could understand when and how they chose to consume art. What I learned is that many Egyptians really value cultural authenticity, which they identify with particular styles or symbols in the paintings they like. These values compelled them to return to specific collections in the museum on weekends, and to do other activities that they associated with art-viewing during the week, like going to cultural festivals with friends in Old Cairo, drawing their own works of art, or reading artist biographies at local libraries. Understanding the core values that underlie people’s love (or apathy) for a particular film or show can help research analysts at media companies create remarkable viewer experiences through creating and selling interactive game kits, as well as branded clothing and merchandise. Art history shows us that the relevance of an artwork or visual piece extends way beyond the work itself, and that viewers want to continue experiencing that content through other activities and cultural practices.

By analyzing everything from motion picture content, industry talent, consumer behavior, and, yes, Internet memes, art historians reveal profound insights about the wider human experience, including people’s fears and fantasies, and their cultural and political beliefs. Streaming giants and entertainment companies can’t make viewers offer up their eyeballs on a silver platter, but they can attract and maintain audiences by putting an art historian in their arsenals.