he’d answered in turn, remarking on warmth and effectively concluding that string of conversation, & in the ensuing silence, a part of stephanie felt more at home. sure, there was the added, thin layer of anxiety from having another person in the car that distorted her consciousness – the sudden hyper-awareness that she ought to drive as safely as possible, further reminding her that she only got her license less than a year ago (a detail she figured was worth omitting) – but her white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel relaxed as the music progressed. her eyes fixated on the road, and though she had to force herself to concentrate on the music, joaquín’s presence beside her and its added tension soon distilled until he was nothing. forgettable, even; though there still remained that fraction of her peripheral vision that watched him – the fraction that bit into her lip as the pencils had scattered across his lap.
in a split-second glance, driving down the road, she was able to notice details that ordinarily would have escaped her: the soft, misty halo around the street lamps, an overturned garbage can in the alley beside a burger joint, the small dent near the license plate of a silver ford fiesta. even the sight of her hands before her, almost birdlike, blue and numb, unable to grip so well anymore. noticing these things kept the world somewhat dreamlike, which was what stephanie felt she needed — it kept things from becoming too real, too fast, as thoughts floated through her mind. it was routine, her and this mental metronome. predictable, marching her forward and keeping time. she could hear, betwixt the radio’s melody and her own absent hum emanating from within her ribcage, the tick of another missed beat & in the silence between joaquín’s breath and her own, she awaited the next tick. constant, reliable, like the noise of an intermittently dripping faucet; dripping in her vision like thick fog in moments she wanted to be still.
it may have just been having another body in the car that so consistently brought her in and out of this cognizance, attention alternating between violins and his voice a moment later, but the subconscious desire to both forget him entirely and initiate some sort of verbal exchange came and went. as the opening strains of a piece by clara schumann came through the speakers, stevie let out an involuntary sigh – likely directed at joaquín, for breaking the silence she’d been previously trying to lose herself in. yet with his words came a welcome relief, stark in contrast against the once more encroaching feeling of judgment— of being judged. it could be argued (strongly) that she was too sensitive, or that she constantly misinterpreted tone and word choice into her own distortion. perhaps it was just the fact that the questions came from joaquín that so immediately brought on the need to bite her tongue. to give way to true emotion, to have a real moment with him, meant disregarding her already ingrained impression of him. & so she did. for art’s sake.
even as her mouth opened to respond, stevie found herself at a loss for words. her eyes went from the road to his hands for a suspended moment; watching as his thumbnail scraped against the pencil he still held, noticing the soft edges to his knuckles. her thoughts went over what he’d said – nobody’s museum-level in college, how do you grade a sketchbook – and in the pause she had to take to consider her own response, she thought only of art’s dictionary definition: the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. & she thought of how nothing defined art; not even that technical, broad statement. it was both true and untrue; both dead and alive until observed— which was exactly what her point came down to. she’d get to it after a bit of indulgence, as her tone took on the guise of retrospection before something more curious, even matter-of-fact
settled in – suitable for explanation.
❛ well, my opinion could wreak havoc on a student’s grade, so i don’t think about my feelings at all. i generally have two methods: the rubric system, or a grading guide. i’ll either incorporate a strict rubric with a general outline of what standards a piece must meet, which is a more straightforward way to turn in a-grade work. with a grading guide, i offer a student the chance to self-evaluate, which is important for their personal development as an artist. they grade themselves, and i consider their notes or views as i grade them. it lets them know why they received the mark and how to improve upon it for the next assignment. – i’m guessing you asked because you saw my own on the floor. you can look through ‘em, if you’d like.
❛ but to further answer your question… have you ever heard of my bed by tracey emin? it was a work exhibited in the tate gallery, & it was literally just the artist’s bed with, essentially, junk around it. inspired by a period of days she’d spent lying in bed consuming nothing but alcohol and accumulating nothing but trash… condoms, stains, cigarette butts… you name it. it’s been called out as a shameful piece of art, and yet even in that critique it’s still defined as art. someone, anyone, could’ve put their bed on display, dumped trash ‘round it, and called it art. but tracey emin did it first.
just like that, once she’d begun, stevie felt herself get carried away – it’d always been difficult to get her to stop when passion ebbed and flowed. as she went on, signaling to merge into another lane, she even felt her voice soften; thoughts cooling from their earlier beats. silence, now. the comfortable kind. a warmth she could settle into indefinitely; a warmth she’d lost when joaquín had asked for a ride, and a warmth she’d just regained now that he’d prompted it to return. she’d speak with her hands if she didn’t feel the need to keep them both on the wheel.
❛ which leads me to ask: what constitutes as museum-level art? i mean… there’s not necessarily a technical difference between a gallery and a museum, unless you consider the fact that museums generally exhibit items of historical significance – even that’s not the case for all of them. i apologize for answering your question with a question, & considering it’s difficult to give a straightforward answer, i feel i should apologize twice.
❛ but that’s exactly what this boils down to: subjectivism, beauty in the eye of the beholder. i think that’s what you were initially referring to… how do i grade sketchbooks when all of art is subjective? we as humans have a natural tendency to see our subjective opinions as objective truths. it’s why critics give theirs factually, and it’s why we’re often not so easily swayed. there’s no external, universal truth. reality is what we perceive to be real.
❛ that’s all sort of why i love art… nothing’s concrete & everything’s ever-changing. i don’t see the same things you do, because i’m not looking through your eyes, so it’s not one thing to one person all of the time, et cetera, et cetera… i feel free, finally. do you know what i mean?
For a couple of minutes, she had him. Held him, even — his attention, all this staccato talking starting to seem like conversation, Quino’s shoulder lifting off the window behind him so he could face her better. It had been a genuine question, and she answered it genuinely enough. Rubrics and sliding scales. And he was thinking about his conversations with math professors (chemistry) (spanish), about how he was lucky to have leniency, sometimes, in how he judged someone else’s work. There were wrong answers in the humanities, but he got to pick what they were. And still, there were bad grades just for bad memory or MLA format. And she had self-evals.
With anyone else, it would’ve read as weakness. Maybe it was supposed to read even more so, with her — he still said her name like an extra in an ER scene, paging Dr. Edwards — but her voice was clear despite the strings humming the door-speaker against his sleeve. He raised his hand to the heating vent again, and his skin came away warm. Quino hadn’t thought of looking through the sketchbooks on the floor. When she offered, he shook it off.
And then she switched her answer to a lecture, and he was reaching between his ankles for the first one he could grab.
He’d never been to The Tate, okay? What was that, London? — he’d never been north of Maine, farther East than… well, Maine — Quino pressed his tongue into molars and shifted and tried not to make a list in his head of all the ways he was cultured, too, more than she was, more than most. Don’t let it be about that. Not when it could be about this, instead: the book in his lap, the cover that wouldn't close for all the puckered pages underneath. He tucked his seatbelt behind his back so he could sit sideways, angling to catch the streetlamps outside. Every few seconds, the car lit up. Like trying to read in a thunderstorm, Quino’s shadow disappearing in the dark spaces between.
The thing about art is it makes you aware. Stephanie was still talking. He turned a page and sand sprinkled onto his slacks. So he was more careful with the next one. She’d left half a thumbprint in the corner, smaller than his (and why wouldn’t it be?), but her fingers were clean where they folded around the steering wheel — and for the second time that night, Quino swallowed the word sorry. This was more interesting than opening his mouth, anyway. There were people in here, taped-down pictures, smudged shading, a whole page on just hands, whole pages of the same body posed and posed again.
You can't give a grade for something like this.
He didn't care what she said.
It took him a beat to notice that the last silence wasn’t just her catching her breath. Quino had picked up some of the words, as she’d gone on — enough to get her general idea, definitely enough to get her general tone — but every time he looked up to check in, Stephanie looked less like a person he wanted to listen to. He might’ve gone another few minutes without saying anything, if not for the space between songs; suddenly, the page made a sound when he turned it, and he lifted his head to blink. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I...” She'd been talking. He closed the book on his knee. "I don't see that. Nothing's left up to -- I don't know, interpretation -- not all the way. That's just something people say to make themselves feel better for disagreeing with everyone else." Okay, right; now he was filling in the blanks. It had been touch-and-go, for a minute there. "Art's supposed to mean something. Or make you feel something, maybe -- make a lot of people feel something. My step-brother has his kid's doodles on his desk, but that doesn't meant they should be in a gallery. One guy saying this is art doesn't make it matter."
He wasn't saying any of this right. He could hear it in his voice, the way conviction deflates if you don't have the context to back it up. Just another way to feel small. "I'm obviously not an authority," he added. "And I know authorities aren't authorities. But for me, it's... it has to be more than to each his own. You have to be saying something, and I have to hear it -- even if I have to read the little wall-description, first. That, or you need to be really, really good at painting flowers. In the 1900s.” At least that was half a joke.
