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New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg isn't the touchy-feely sort. He's a tightly wound efficiency expert, a gear head who became a billionaire 10 times over by selling a computer system that helped rich people become richer. Three years ago, when he hosted a news conference at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Christo and Jeanne-Claude's colossal saffron-curtain installation in Central Park known as The Gates, he acknowledged the artistic worth of the project but preferred to focus on how much money it would bring the city.

Which is why it was so delightful to hear him last week, during an overflowing news conference at the South Street Seaport to officially open The New York City Waterfalls, the city's largest public-art project since The Gates, speaking about the transformative aspects of art and calling for greater art appreciation among the public.

“I was an engineer at school and I think, looking back, the one place my parents failed me is they should have beaten me over the head and had me take more courses to appreciate the arts,” he said. “Maybe if I'd done that a little earlier I would have had more great experiences.”

Waterfalls was dreamed up by the Danish-Icelandic conceptualist Olafur Eliasson.

It consists of four man-made waterfalls placed around the eastern belly of New York Harbor, ranging in height from 30 to 40 metres: one on Pier 35 on the east side of Manhattan, one nestled under the Brooklyn Bridge like a ruffled skirt, one tucked between a couple of piers next to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, and one standing sentry in front of old barracks on Governor's Island. More than two years in the making, Waterfalls will stay up until Oct. 13.

At the news conference, Bloomberg noted that his personal taste in art tends to be limited to Old Masters and large sculptures such as the ones made by the abstract expressionist Mark di Suvero, who happens to be the husband of Kate Levin, the city's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. But since taking office in January of 2002, he's been making up for lost time in his art education by hanging out with artists such as Eliasson and Doug Aitken, whose silent film sleepwalkers was projected on the exterior walls of MoMA last year. Bloomberg hasn't yet donned a beret and started puffing away on clove cigarettes; but then again, he was the one who banned smoking in city restaurants.

Eliasson has noted that water tends to be a two-dimensional presence in the city's landscape, as a river surface; he wants to make water explicit, tangible, to give it volume. (He may also be trying to remind us that the water in the East River doesn't always look toxic.) There is a dialogue in his project between the heavy backbone of construction scaffolding and the ethereal but relentless nature of the falls. And by using four sites, he has tied together a narrative about the city's history that takes in its role as a port, as an early industrial hub, as a purveyor of international icons, and as a place of military conflict.

The change in seasons will afford a richer appreciation of the work, which mutates with the elements: On one visit, the falls seemed to dance and swirl with the warm rain of a humid day; on another, they were lost in the overcast wash of the skyline. The volume of water is less than one might expect or want, and the opening weekend didn't offer much varied weather, but I had one transcendent moment. On Saturday just before 9 p.m., as a baby blue dusk curled around the harbour and the lights of the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges began to twinkle in the distance, I stood on the third floor of the Seaport and watched as the scaffolding of the Pier 35 falls seemed to evaporate. Only a dancing column of water was left in the air, a primordial apparition that spoke of tropical heat and dreams. The city itself seemed an enigma: Who knows how many similar mysteries it held?

Waterfalls is the sort of work that even New York's former mayor, Rudy Giuliani, could appreciate. (The twice-divorced, philandering moralist's primary relationship with art consisted of his attempts to ban work he considered offensive and to strip city funding from museums that supported such work.) It is a critical hit (the Times's Roberta Smith gushed over it in a review on Friday), and its $15.5-million price tag was paid for almost entirely out of private funds ($2-million came from the state's post-Sept. 11 body, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation).

Some funders were motivated out of pure self-interest: the head of the Circle Line Downtown, which is a main supporter, told me his boat-cruise operation is doubling its number of daily departures from the South Street Seaport, from 15 to 30. And the city's most active developers, who stepped up with cash and material assistance, are flush from Bloomberg's pro-development policies.

But the bulk of the funds were raised from more than 200 individuals, businesses and foundations one dollar at a time by the Public Art Fund, a non-profit organization which has produced more than 500 works since its inception in 1977.

Even if you don't know the fund, you know some of the works, recent examples of which include the return in the summer of 2000 of Jeff Koons's flowering puppy, Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror in the fall of 2006, and Takashi Murakami's Reversed Double Helix, all at Rockefeller Center. Until July 19, Rockefeller Center is hosting Chris Burden's What My Dad Gave Me, also produced by the fund, a six-storey-high skyscraper made from more than one million Erector Set pieces.

And I adored Rachel Whiteread's ghostly Water Tower (2000), a translucent resin cast of the inside of a water tower placed atop a building in SoHo. A cunning temporary intervention in the built environment, it stopped me cold when it caught my eye, as public art should.

Last week, Bloomberg told the world's media, “What is art to you doesn't necessarily have to be art to the other person, or doesn't necessarily have to be the other person's favourite, and I think we have an obligation to our kids to open their eyes. They don't have to become artists, they don't even have to grow up liking art, but we fail them if we don't give them the opportunity to know it exists and to experience it. And then, when they're adults, they can make their own decisions.”

Public-art advocates frequently speak about the need to cultivate artistic appreciation among children, but I wonder if the emphasis isn't misplaced. Children have a bottomless capacity for enchantment. But to survive as an adult in New York, you have to form a second skin to protect yourself from daily threats to your mind and body. New Yorkers aren't rude; they're just trying desperately to not succumb to the sensory onslaught. Public art pierces the adaptive armour and briefly reminds people of why they came to this city: Because it is a place of wonder that reveals itself anew every day, if you let it. And you don't have to be a billionaire to appreciate that.