https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/business/media/denver-airport.html
"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."
Via Brad Koehn and Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
