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Mr. Zhang will preside over the opening ceremonies.

Nearly two years in the making, his spectacle is intended to present China’s new face to the world with stagecraft and pyrotechnics that organizers boast have no equal in the history of the Games.

Some Chinese critics panned “Hero” as an implicit homage to authoritarian rule. While it did not win an Oscar, it became one of the highest grossing foreign films in the American market.

Its success gave rise to the rapid commercialization — and depoliticization — of Chinese art. China’s cultural landscape is now filled with big-budget historical dramas, multimillion dollar art auctions, government-backed opera and dance extravaganzas, and bold new state-financed entertainment venues that suggest a melding of art, culture, power and national pride.

To help create China’s cultural moment, Mr. Zhang initially tapped Steven Spielberg to work as artistic adviser on the opening ceremonies.

But under pressure to sever ties because of China’s role in Sudan, Mr. Spielberg resigned in February, saying that his conscience troubled him and that China should do more to stop genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

As New York City grew through the 1800s, it reached far up the Hudson for its very life. The river was lined with railroad tracks, sawmills, paper mills, ice houses, brick yards, iron foundries and other industrial sites, all feeding the metropolis.

He had thought that fans would willingly pay the price of a latte to support musicians directly. But fewer than 20 percent did so. “I think I was just naïve.”

At the time he called the project a failure, but he has reconsidered. “The numbers of the people that paid for that record, versus the people that paid for his last record, were greater,” he said. “He made infinitely more money from that record than he did from his other one. It increased his name value probably tenfold. At the end of the day, counting free downloads, it was probably five or six or seven times higher than the amount sold on his last record. I don’t know how you could look at that as a failure.”

Eliasson: I was interested in bringing life to a space that constitutes a non-space in New York, a space that simply doesn't count. Wall Street is traditionally more important there that the water. In other words, I wanted to draw attention to something that has always been there and yet goes largely unnoticed.

SPIEGEL: Do you always emphasize strong sensations?

Eliasson: Yes, because physical experience makes a much deeper impression than a purely intellectual encounter. I can explain to you what it's like to feel cold, but I can also have you feel the cold yourself through my art. My goal is to sensitize people to highly complex questions.

It's refreshing to hear someone explain Street Art beyond monetary or cultural terms, because few will. Ben Lewis, an art critic who's currently filming a documentary about the contemporary art market called Brave New Art World, says: 'People buy Street Art and they like looking at it. That doesn't make it good quality.'

Though he cheerfully describes much of the Street-Art movement as 'wank', he does admit that Banksy and a few others may stand the test of time. 'Banksy's work is interesting because there are lots of ways that meaning is accreted to it. He'd done these pieces in difficult places - there's a political story, a celebrity story and a youth culture story, and he's capitalised on that by producing work that consumers can buy. '

'You might never see me, I may never wear shoes, you're not the boss of me.' And I'm sure they were saying, 'Whatever you want, Mr. Rubin.' I was surprised Sony made such a smart decision: someone who knows music should be running the company."

In addition to his "never wearing a suit, never traveling, never going to an office" demands, Rubin also suggested (strongly) that Columbia become the first major record company to go green and abolish plastic jewel boxes for all its CDs. "They thought about it and agreed," Rubin said. "And that made me think they would listen to me. It was also a turning point in terms of how big my reach could be. In the past, I would not normally have access to that kind of sweeping change. At Columbia, I'm able to operate on a much larger scale."