Art vs. science

There definitely are parallels between studying either the process or the "content" of a scientific field and studying what I would refer to as "technique" in the art world. Musical composition is one example, and as a visual artist I can add things like color theory, semiotics, visual composition, and the handling of various mediums. These are phenomena that can and have been taught and written about. They can be as objectively addressed as any scientific subject in that you can say "if you follow procedure X, you'll get Y result".

But these things are supplemental to the primary goals of art/artists which are profoundly different from the goals of science/scientists. The goals of artists are generally personal and/or subconscious. They don't (normally/consciously) involve a hypothesis to be proven or disproven (and artist statements are typically written after the work is complete, not beforehand).

There are formal studies of what groups of artists may be trying to achieve (surrealists, cubists, expressionists, etc), but the cultural and biographical details are usually very relevant. I guess I'd say that your test is one possible measure of a more general question: "Is the endeavor more focused on making a statement, or on answering a question?". The more it emphasizes the former the more likely it is to be art (or politics, or lunatic raving. Or all three, depending on how entertaining, persuasive, or coherent it is), the more it emphasizes the latter the more likely it is to be something deserving of the name science (even if it may also deserve to be preceded by the words "sloppy" or "pseudo").

At my undergrad I felt like I was expected to side with my professors in their worship of Chomsky. Also, my general experience is that Chomsky is a lightning rod for the more polemic aspects of the field, he loves to make sweeping dismissals of entire subfields, which then encourages people to take sides.

In grad school, in syntax and historical we do go through concepts by reading specific papers written by Famous People in the field, but we also deconstruct those papers. It's not so much "you need to read Pollock to understand the cartographic approach to syntax" as "here's a bunch of evidence Pollock found to suggest we need more fine-grained projections". And more than one of the profs has explicitly told us that part of the reason we're learning by reading the primary literature rather than decontextualised versions is because we need to learn how to read and analyse academic papers if we want to be able to do our own research.

I would also note that the primary difference between linguistics and modern physics is that in modern physics there's a correct answer to teach, while in linguistics most areas haven't yet been settled. Instead there are a lot of different theories with different areas of explanatory coverage and no unifying theory that works yet. It's the kind of situation that fosters Blue/Green partisanship and I would expect that to persist until someone comes up with a theory that's more obviously correct than the current offerings.