It's aquatic. It's epic. But is it real art?

Considering that they're a creative bunch to begin with, it's perhaps no surprise that the art crowd in America's seventh-largest city has come up with plenty of ways to describe a proposed $50 million civic fountain.

The real humdinger is the force of the language used to slap around the waterfront project, which envisions five bronze killer whales tethered to a five-story-tall sculpture of Neptune.

Words like "hackneyed," "clichéd," and "irrelevant" are just the beginning. The fountain is an "artistic embarrassment" and a "kitschy retread of Soviet-style socialist realism," complains a coalition of big shots from the arts community in a letter to the San Diego Union-Tribune. "It is so solidly and squarely in the past and conservative and unambitious in every way that it would just label us as mediocre," says the director of a local art museum.

Moving in for the kill is Union-Tribune art critic Robert Pincus, who writes: "If this is the future for art in public places here, then let's have public places without art."

Yikes. With all these negative vibes, one might think Neptune & Co. would never move beyond the drawing board. But a funny thing happened on the way to the scrapheap of rejected public art projects. Many members of the public - along with a coalition of enthusiastic city boosters - actually like the thing.

"It's something that people would put on their lists of things to visit and see," predicts a hopeful Reint Reinders, president of the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau.

This is hardly the first clash over the aesthetic value of a piece of public art. In a country where an estimated 360 government agencies sponsor public art programs, arguments such as this happen all the time.

But the battle of words - and wills - over the proposed artwork in San Diego comes with higher stakes than most. And not just because of the multimillion dollar price tag. Rather, this is an issue of civic pride. If built, the massive sculpture has the potential to become a signature landmark in a burgeoning city that is seeking greater recognition and a clearer individual identity.

This sun-blessed border city already has plenty of sights - the San Diego Zoo (always preceded by the words "world famous"), the beaches (including a renowned one where clothes are optional), and hot spots for the rich and famous like La Jolla and Coronado.

But some of the nearly 1.3 million residents here sense that the world thinks of their town as little more than a satellite of the behemoth burg to the north.

To critics such as Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the city's never-ending brouhahas over public art may doom it to second-class status, forever in the shadow of Los Angeles. "We have an unusually checkered and undistinguished history in our inability to build or welcome works of public art," Mr. Davies says.

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