I suspect that, at the "upper levels" (college, graduate, and beyond), many disciplines are not about the things that they appear, at first blush, to be about. Linguistics is "about language" in the sense that it uses language to study a diverse range of topics, including anthropology, sociology, and thought processes. Architecture is "about buildings" in the sense that, through buildings, we study spatiality, human use patterns and relationships, psychology, and the ordering of the universe. Art is about understanding and communicating just about everything.