Learning to See Data as Art

In the NYT:  The art and science of data visualization.   " ... Advanced computing produces waves of abstract digital data that in many cases defy interpretation; there’s no way to discern a meaningful pattern in any intuitive way. To extract some order from this chaos, analysts need to continually reimagine the ways in which they represent their data — which is where Mr. Kohn comes in. He spent 10 years working with scientists and knows how to pose useful questions. He might ask, for instance, What if the data were turned sideways? Or upside down? Or what if you could click on a point on the plotted data and see another dimension? ... " 

I re-read this and thought: Do we really need artists to help us find subtle patterns in data?  I thought that humans were already too good at finding spurious patterns when not there..