"P.T. Barnum was certainly right when he said 'There's one born every minute.' But how come so many of them get to spend our tax dollars?"

On the Seventh of March, 1990, the National Gallery of Canada's purchase of this huge abstract painting by American artist Barnett Newman ignited a two-month furore in the media and the House of Commons.

And today, twenty years later, debate is still smouldering.

The acquisition cost the Canadian public $1.76 million, an expenditure that provoked an unprecedented reaction from the media, the public and government.

Despite rationalization from the gallery's director ("We rarely have a chance in today's over-heated art market to purchase works of the scale and historical significance of Voice of Fire," said Shirley Thomson) the transaction was called Canada's biggest art scandal.

Originally commissioned by the American government for an exhibition of U.S. contemporary art at Montreal's Expo '67, the painting - a 5.4-metre-high by 2.4-metre-wide canvas with three stripes - was expected to be a worthy addition to the new gallery's main display space.

‘TWO ROLLERS AND TEN MINUTES ...’

Instead, it met with an outburst of public opinion ranging from amusement to scorn to rage.

"P.T. Barnum was certainly right when he said 'There's one born every minute.' But how come so many of them get to spend our tax dollars?" one woman wrote to the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.

On a Winnipeg radio talk show, Manitoba MP Felix Holtmann, chairman of the House of Commons committee on communications and culture, expressed his opinion on minimalism thus:

"It looks like two cans of paint and two rollers and about ten minutes would do the trick."

His committee called the gallery directors before it and even contemplated making them rescind the offer until it found out the sale was irreversible.

The two-month controversy was chronicled in a 1996 book Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power and the State, edited by Bruce Barber, Serge Guilbaut and John O'Brian, and was recently resurrected by Macleans magazine (link below) which asked, “Are We Over This Yet?”

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/01/21/are-we-over-this-yet/