As an artist, Creative Director and past instructor myself, my observation of this story arc is that that Zebo feels, rightly, that Tara deserves an A from an artist’s POV. She is taking chances, using her gut intuition (even if it is done as a sort of sleight of the class I.E.: “this is a skate through class and not important.”) allowing the emotion of the moment to drive her creativity and sending a message about the “rules” of the assignment. As a natural artist, which Tara has already been established as in character and temperament so far, she sees Zebo’s class as a kind of simple joke. But Zebo looks past this to the NATURE of the resultant art.
However, he is laying Tara’s grade at Luann’s feet to teach his TA a lesson in several things… loyalty, situational awareness, objectivity, trust, faith and most of all PRIDE. Luann takes her role as a TA seriously. So seriously that she has begun to act as a toady/tyrant, usurping Zebo’s authority as the class instructor. Luann seems to THINK that Zebo WANTS her to judge the VALUE of the work being produced. Rather he seems to me to want her to be both helpful (in the spare set of hands sense) and capable of seeing THROUGH the surface of the assignment to identify the talent of the students so that SHE, LUANN, grows in her observational skills… he would like her to experience the empathy artists must possess to be effective, even if SHE is not the one creating the art.
By throwing Luann under the bus and making HER responsible for Tara’s F grade, he is giving her the hangman’s rope she would use as judge and jury to convict her friend, thus jeopardizing their friendship. I suspect his goal would be to teach Luann the lesson that no great artistic triumph comes and no talent flourishes under a system so focused on the wrong thing… in this case personal respect. Zebo is far from stupid or myopic and he is showing Luann the error in her rush to judgement because she is using the wrong yardstick to measure art by.
LOL… Zebo, building character one F at a time.