Not many have forgotten the controversy that surrounded Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire when the National Gallery of Canada announced in 1990 that it had purchased the work for a cool $1.79-million. For eight months the public and media gleefully raked the gallery’s curators and the painting across burning coals. Political cartoonists stoked the embers with depictions of the gallery’s selection committee as Curly, Larry, and Moe, and resurrected the classic minimalist art joke: “What are you blind? You hung it upside down!”

No matter what gallery staff might have said about the work – why it is important to Canada as a work that, since its debut at Expo ’67, has had significant influence on many national artists (Guido Molinari and Robert Murray, for instance), or, that, at the end of the late 1980s inflated art market, the gallery had actually purchased the work for a song – the rest of Canada couldn’t see past the seven-digit price tag. Hence Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power and the State, a collection of essays written by art professionals who, with the advantage of hindsight, have taken on the painting and hype as an intriguing case-study of high-brow meets low-brow.

Only on occasion do the writings slip into dense art-speak. Brydon Smith’s formalist appreciation of the work, and Serge Guilbaut’s discourse on Newman’s theories might not speak to the average reader. But for the most part, the essayists stay light on their feet with lucid writing that gives insight into why and how Voice of Fire became a symbol for other social, political, and economic uncertainties of the time – the Meech Lake Accord, if you recall, was in ruins that year. Bruce Barber’s essay looks at how the media usurped the experts and pandered to the public, and Thierry de Duve’s postmodernist essay, “Vox Ingnis Vox Populi,” is an entertaining argument on when art becomes art. This book speaks to the converted, but there is also room for enlightenment.