Equine art lives in many airports: Seattle and San Francisco have bronze horses shaped like driftwood, Central Illinois has wire horses suspended from the ceiling, Tucson has a winged horse and Barcelona has a burly horse.
None of them have a horse like Blucifer.
Rearing 32 feet tall in a median outside Denver International Airport, the cobalt-colored, demon-eyed, vein-streaked steed has terrified travelers and mobilized conspiracy theorists since it arrived 15 years ago. First, though, it killed its creator.
The artist Luis Jimenez designed the statue, officially known as “Mustang,” to make reference to Mexican murals and the energy of the Southwest, with glowing red eyes meant as a homage to his father’s neon workshop. The horse came to stand for something darker: In 2006, as Mr. Jimenez was finishing the 9,000-pound cast-fiberglass sculpture, a piece came loose and fatally severed an artery in his leg.
A giant, murderous stallion makes sense as a mascot for an airport with notoriety to spare, where a nearby art installation can be misconstrued as a portrayal of the Covid-19 virus and a rumor — that a humanoid reptilian race lives under the facility — can surface on the popular sitcom “Abbott Elementary.” The actor Macaulay Culkin, famous for navigating the horror of Manhattan during holiday season, tweeted that “the Denver Airport is the scariest place I’ve ever been in my life.”
In recent American history, mass delusions about election fraud and baseless rumors about the Covid-19 pandemic and environmental disasters have burrowed into mainstream discourse and the top echelons of government authority. Technology continues to warp reality. Conspiracy theories about nefarious political and racist plots have been cited by rioters at the U.S. Capitol and perpetrators of mass shootings.
The Denver airport is far less terrifying — not so much a society-shaking assault on truth, more an ongoing experiment into whether sometimes, institutional fabulism can just be fun.
One official statement was attributed to a “Sr. Illuminati Spokesman.” An employee appeared in a goofy video to explain a suspicious inscription in the Great Hall: “AU AG,” she said, did not represent the Australia antigen, which is associated with viral hepatitis and linked by conspiracy theorists to genocidal plague. Rather, it nodded to gold and silver, metals central to Colorado’s mining history.
The Denver airport tall tales tend to not be particularly dangerous…
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