The contributors to Art and the Global City capture an historic moment when traditional and innovative approaches to public art are reshaping cities around the globe. Storytelling through various formsphysical and digital, permanent and transient, always performative, and interactivesaturate once moribund urban spaces. Collectively and individually, such art in cities encourage connectivity as opposed to hierarchy. As this volumes insightful essays demonstrate, todays global cities constitute an emerging liquid polis redefining urban citizenship. Blair A. Ruble, Distinguished Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Author of The Muse of Urban Delirium Art and the Global City: Public Space, Transformative Media, and the Politics of Urban Rhetoric makes original and significant contributions to how we think about public art as a form of media and communication. The authors extend the idea of communicative cities, showing how public art originates, gets commissioned (through municipal and political processes of recruiting artists, determining sites, negotiating fees, etc.), produced, and responded to by urban audiences, and how it transforms physical and social environments. The authors, scholars from different academic disciplines, explore a wide and fascinating range of urban art projectseverything from light art to ghost signs to neighborhood murals. I highly recommend this new book for anyone interested in how public artists help urban residents mediate and negotiate modern citiscapes. Kenneth Zagacki, Department of Communication, North Carolina State University
