Corrections or additions?
This article was prepared for the November 15, 2000 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Between the Lines
Our election week began with the November 8 cover image
still rattling around in our brain: Richard Serra’s monumental sculpture,
"The Hedgehog and the Fox," being dedicated on the campus
of Princeton University.
Shortly after publication of Pat Summers’ article and interview with
the artist, we received an E-mail from Thomas H. Wright, vice president
and secretary at Princeton University. "What a lovely article
you wrote," Wright said. "Today, when the sculpture is dedicated,
I will be giving Richard Serra and his wife, Clara, a half-dozen copies
of U.S. 1, and I am certain that he will be immensely pleased by the
richly appreciative way that you have covered this installation.
"Certainly I am pleased — and grateful! Many thanks for your
thoroughness, carefulness, sensitivity — and generosity."
That appreciative note encouraged our editor, Richard K. Rein, to
venture from his cubicle and attend the dedication. Rein had been
a teaching assistant at the university in the spring of 1972 and a
student in the class was Peter Joseph ’72, the alumnus who commissioned
the sculpture and donated it to Princeton shortly before his death
from cancer.
Rein was able to visit with several of Joseph’s half dozen siblings,
share memories from 1972, and bestow more copies of the U.S. 1 article
upon the visitors to the dedication, and return with the program from
the ceremony.
That document provided additional detail on the origins of the sculpture’s
title. In U.S. 1 last week we had noted that the title, "The Hedgehog
and the Fox," is from an old proverb that has come down to us
from the Greeks: "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows
one great thing."
In the program notes prepared for the dedication ceremony Hal Foster,
a Princeton professor of art and archaeology, elaborated: "Serra
has titled his sculpture `The Hedgehog and the Fox,’ an allusion to
an old proverb about different ways of life: there are those who follow
one principle in all they do (the hedgehogs) and those who look to
different approaches at the same time (the foxes). The suggestion
is that students might negotiate a balance between these two ways.
Serra is also interested in balance: his sculpture is a fox in the
complexity of experience that it affords, and a hedgehog in the commitment
to integrity that it demonstrates."
That was Friday afternoon. By that evening Stan Kephart had prepared
a cover image for this week’s issue and we were ready for a day off.
But then we got a call from Doug Dixon: Rebecca Mercuri would be speaking
at the Sarnoff Corporation on Thursday, November 16, and her subject
would be the technology of recording and tabulating election ballots.
Hold the presses! Dixon could get an interview and he could have a
story submitted to us by Monday.
So we asked Kephart to return for another cover session and we remade
our pages to accommodate the story that begins on page 46 of this
issue. We hope you will find it informative. As for us, we are going
to read it once more, counting the foxes and the hedgehogs of the
American political process. We have a feeling we will find far more
of the former than the latter. We do not expect to need a recount.
Corrections or additions?
This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com
— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
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