The primary offense of the Mustang sculpture at DIA is the absolute predictability of the choice: A rearing blue bronco is more of the same around here. It is all too familiar to intrigue me, to suggest new meanings or to offer any surprises.

I have always admired Luis Jimenez's garish and cartoonish two- and three-dimensional work - and Denver and the state are fortunate to be counted among his collectors.

I am not crazy about the appearance of the horse, its design, its details - it seems to be somewhere between fact and fiction, neither as articulate as Leonardo da Vinci's planned but never completed 24-foot horse, nor as chimerical as the horse in Picasso's Guernica. Just a menacing Trigger.

Part of the appeal of the blue bear at the Colorado Convention Center (I See What You Mean) is that it's an aberration, a non sequitur. It permits a viewer to ask, "What's going on here?" And it stimulates an interest in what is unknown (about its size, location, configuration).

The horse does none of that. Perhaps the master of sculptural non sequiturs in public art is Claes Oldenburg. We have one of his pieces too, in front of the art museum (Big Sweep).

It could have been worse, I tell myself. It could have been those dreadful Speer Boulvevard dancers.