AHEAD OF presenting the Turner Prize to Damien Hirst in 1995, musician Brian Eno made a speech in which he berated the art world for its failure to address the big issues of the day. Invoking geneticist Richard Dawkins as an example, he said that science was doing the job art should: firing the public imagination by starting important conversations. That these conversations often became full-on domestic rows was even better in Eno's eyes.

As the days count down to the launch of Gi, the third Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art, it's worth recalling Eno's complaint. For those intending to view Gi's manifold attractions - perhaps Jim Lambie's massive new show at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA); Catherine Yass's multi-screen installation High Wire at the CCA; or The Other Church, Wilhelm Sasnal's sensational film about murdered Polish student Angelina Kluk - it might even make a useful yardstick against which to measure it all.

Fine by me, says festival director Francis McKee. As far as he's concerned, the work which will be presented across the city's art galleries over the 18 days of Gi is highly relevant both to Glasgow and the wider world beyond. It contains ideas and it will start fires. Morever, art made by Glaswegian or Glasgow-based artists is necessarily infused with the spirit of the city and the invited guests such as Yass and Sasnal have been asked to made work which engages with some aspect of the place. Using art as a mirror to view your country and your culture is "a very basic curatorial passion", McKee adds. "It's very exciting. To be able to say, Here are artists in the city, making work about the city and for the city, making work about you and about me' is an amazing thing."

Yass's High Wire is a case in point. Filmed in July 2007 at the iconic Red Road flats, it shows an attempt by French tightrope-walker Didier Pasquette to walk between the buildings. Yass, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2002, has long been obsessed with notions of height, space, scale and perspective. But as well as seeing the dramatic possibilities of the film, she was alive to the neatness of the metaphor: Pasquette becomes a sky walker symbolising the utopian ideal the Red Road flats were supposed to bring about.

YASS used five cameras, one perched on Pasquette's head. The Frenchman, who had previously set a world record when he walked across the river Thames, was to make the attempt on Saturday, July 21, but on the day, and 90 metres up, weather conditions were too bad. So he tried again on the Sunday, despite the vicious crosswind. Thirty metres out, however, he realised he was in danger of falling. He had no safety net. Unable to turn round, he had to reverse the way he came.

The vagaries of the Scottish summer weather meant the 2000 assembled onlookers were disappointed. He didn't cross and he didn't fall. But Pasquette's failure gave Yass's film an even sharper focus. Like the utopian dream itself, the sky walk had failed. The metaphor became even neater.

For Francis McKee, Yass's piece is an eloquent comment on the huge social, economic and architectural changes Glasgow has undergone over the last two decades - changes that have resulted in a great deal of art being created in response. So while a modern history of Glasgow would feature the end of the shipyards, the Bruce Report, the experiments with modernist architecture, gang violence and sectarianism, a parallel narrative exists in the work of Ken Currie, Peter Howson, Roddy Buchanan, Toby Paterson and Martin Boyce.

In part, those changes explain why Glasgow has produced such an extraordinary crop of artists over the past two decades and why Glasgow School of Art graduates have dominated the Turner Prize and Beck's Futures shortlists. In that sense, McKee likens Glasgow's journey to the one Beijing is experiencing today.

"I visited Beijing in 1992 and everyone was still wearing blue boiler suits and cycling everywhere. Now the city has been completely transformed and a way of life has vanished, just as in Glasgow heavy industry vanished almost overnight. It was quite a traumatic event but I think that's good for art. It then goes into that gap and thinks Where can we go next? What's happening here?'"

The result has been a blossoming of artist-run workspaces and an emerging generation of young artists. The sense of excitement and vigour that surrounds contemporary Chinese art is palpable, so McKee has brought artists from Universal Studios in Beijing to exhibit at Glasgow School of Art under the eye of Beijing-based curator Pi Li. The aim is to open a "critical dialogue" between Glasgow and Beijing and, in truth, the cities do seem to have a lot to talk about. Can art become the Babel Fish that goes in the ear of the respective populations and translates it all? McKee certainly hopes so.

If Gi has a centrepiece it is Jim Lambie's GoMA show. Glasgow's contemporary artists have had a love-hate relationship with the gallery over the years due to disagreements with the exhibiting and purchasing policies of former Glasgow Museum and Art Galleries director Julian Spalding. But with Spalding's departure from the scene, there is a sense that the space is now opening up and fulfilling its potential as a platform for the best of Glasgow's artists. Lambie, for the record, has exhibited at Tate Britain and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but this is his first solo show at GoMA and his biggest in Glasgow to date.

Called Forever Changes, Lambie's show features sculptures made from furniture, clothes and old records - the show's title is the name of an album by cult American band Love - and will be presented on a new version of his trademark vinyl floor, a geometric confection of black and white stripes.

Another development which has energised Glasgow's art scene is the emergence of selling galleries dealing in contemporary art. Three of these - the Modern Institute, Mary Mary and the Sorcha Dallas Gallery - are participating in Gi, with the Modern Institute showing new work by 2005 Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, another graduate of Glasgow School of Art. Other venues include the Mitchell Library, Tramway, the Glasgow Science Centre and St Mungo's Museum of Religious Life and Art where American photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper is among those exhibiting work.

For McKee, Cooper is emblematic of the calibre of artist Glasgow can attract and keep. An American teaching at Glasgow School of Art, he is also one of the world's foremost landscape photographers. Moreover, he is utterly committed to Glasgow. He loves the place and has put down roots here. "He is a major artist," says McKee. "His stature is unbelievable but he remains to be celebrated in this city." Not so in Los Angeles, however, where he recently had a show at the County Museum.

Gi grew out of Raw, the contemporary wing of the Glasgow Art Fair, and has been running since 2005. The plan now is to make it a biennial festival and to grow it to the point where it truly reflects Glasgow's pre-eminence as a centre for the production of contemporary visual art. Any comparisons with the Venice Bienale are unfortunate and misleading, says McKee.

"There are so many biennials in the world that you have to think carefully when you start one yourself," he says. "But Glasgow had a good answer in that we deserve one.

"We have something to build on here which is genuine and worth building on. I think some other biennals don't. In other cities, it's simply a tourist promotion and I think that's why it's taken off so quickly here."

It's certainly true that, even before Gi opens, tongues are wagging and arguments are brewing and it's visual art that's the cause. At the centre of the fuss is Wilhelm Sasnal's film The Other Church, a Gi commission in which a punk band is seen singing a song about Angelika Kluk, who was murdered in Glasgow in 2006 and buried below a church.

"One of the things artists are trying to do is imagine what's happening now, thinking about the future and trying to come to terms with things for everyone else," says McKee. "With Wilhelm, I would argue that partly what he's doing is trying to come to terms with what happened and actually providing a piece of work which makes everybody else think about what happened."

One or two challenging works which ignite public debate won't make a satisfactory riposte to Brian Eno's challenge to art to make itself relevant. But many together can. In launching Gi, in celebrating and encouraging home-grown art and inviting international artists to participate in their congress, Glasgow's artists and curators are coming together to try to formulate a response. It is, at the very least, the beginning of the start of an answer.

Gi runs from April 11-27. Forever Changes is at GoMA, Royal Exchange Square, April 11-September 29. High Wire is at the CCA, Sauchiehall Street, April 11-May 24 Previous page: Catherine Yass's High Wire; top, Jim Lambie is set to exhibit in GoMA on a trademark vinyl floor; above, Francis McKee, curator of the festival, who hopes it will provide comment on a city undergoing dramatic change Even before Gi opens, tongues are wagging and arguments are brewing and it's visual art that is the cause