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I'm watching a small child in pink knits shimmy her way across a black and white striped discodelic floor, titled The strokes, 2008 - the work of Scottish op-funk wunderkind, Jim Lambie. Little Miss Pink adds herself to numerous items of fabulous bricolage, tat and LP vinyl concrete bunkers that make up Lambie's 2008 tour de force Forever Changes.

The installation's moniker references an album by American 1960s and 1970s rock, funk, psychedelic fusion band, Love. You might call Lambie's work baroque. Certainly in this instance his swirls of black and white striations and jumble of coloured chairs and mirrored elements adds another dimension to the stately, neoclassical interior of Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art. Lambie follows the curvature of the vaulted ceiling and robust columns, but in a wild, unleashed kind of way. The effect is a happy extravagance that holds itself in check.

Lambie was not billed as the centerpiece of the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art (Gi), but it certainly felt that way. And geographically - and indeed symbolically - housed as it was in one of the city's most prominent museums, this ambitious work marked the pivotal and institutional gravity point for this city-wide event. In April Gi launched its third, and so far largest event of exhibitions, lectures, performances and special happenings. It was a feisty mix of the local and international with equitable distribution. Hometown and homegrown heroes like the aforementioned Lambie and the more somber Simon Starling mixed with the imported art aficionados and legends: Rodney Graham with his band, Catherine Yass, Adel Abdessemed, Wilhelm Sasnal, and upcomers such as Calum Stirling, Dani Marti and Katri Walker.

Gi is a success. From fledgling beginnings by way of the cultural capital spend, the festival appears to have come of age under its own steam with committed investment from the city and local gallerists, artists, institutions and vacant building owners. As an event it reignites the promise established by the first generation of artists - Douglas Gordon, Christine Borland, Ross Sinclair, Roddy Buchanan - and their immediate successors, and posits Glasgow as a city seething with contemporary art and ideas. This is a welcome reassertion of Glasgow's position as an artistic northern star, which drifted during the mid-1990s and early 2000s.

Glasgow feels like a city ready to expand and become one of those highly desirable 'creative clusters' that demographers get all tingly about. Apple Macintosh recently opened their Scottish headquarters here, which says something about the market perception of Glasgow as a design-focused, creative outlet. And so this year's Gi may have been the last time we could pop our heads down to enter unfathomably cool spaces like the abandoned bath house, home to Starling's Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006, which comprises a slow slide dissolve of an epic boat ride across Loch Long, in which the wooden boat cannibalises itself as a source of fuel for its own engine: will they make it?! Or this year's festival may have been the last time we could have visited various shop fronts and basements which were undoubtedly just waiting for the development boom to take hold. But wait! There's the subprime mortgage crisis, so Glasgow's growth might be put on hold...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Spring 2008 issue.