Art, as the saying goes, holds up a mirror to the world.

But the job of reflecting an image of the artists themselves is done best not by a mirror but by a director, a camera crew and a commissioning editor prepared to take risks - at least that's the view of Jonty Claypole, the recently-appointed Director of Arts at the BBC.

Claypole, right, is one of the driving forces behind Art Screen, a new four-day arts documentary festival running as part of the ongoing Glasgow International biennial. It will screen new commissions and specially-curated documentaries - by Martin Scorsese, Jarvis Cocker and artist Jeremy Deller among others - alongside standouts and curios drawn from the BBC's extensive archive.

"We in the UK are one of the world's largest producers of arts documentaries," Claypole explains. "In fact, the arts documentary began here but there's no place where we can celebrate them. So it felt important to us to create an arena where we can inspire audiences with new films about the arts, bring together filmmakers who can talk to audiences and talk about the interesting issues about how you portray art on screen, and create an environment where we can advance the art of arts documentary-making."

Claypole's wish is that Art Screen become an annual event in Glasgow or, at the very least, a regular fixture at the biennial Glasgow International. Either way, Art Screen's presence at what is now one of Europe's most important visual art festivals is a recognition that a significant portion of the BBC's arts documentaries are now produced in Glasgow, and a celebration of the city's standing as a centre for visual art. Barely a year goes by without a Glasgow-based or Glasgow-trained artist featuring on the list of Turner Prize nominees, and Claypole isn't slow to hail what he calls "the brilliant creative vibrancy" of the city.

Art Screen celebrates it too. The programme gives world premieres to Our Glasgow, a film about the city's visual art scene by Jennifer Higgie of Frieze Magazine, and Facing Up To Mackintosh, a BBC documentary about Glasgow School of Art's new Reid Building and the challenges its architects faced.

Art Screen's opening film deals with a very different city, however - Rio De Janeiro. Titled Rio, it has been commissioned by the BBC and directed by Julian Temple, who has already made similar city studies of Detroit and London. Martin Scorsese, meanwhile, has filmed a special introduction for a screening of Italianamerican, a very personal documentary featuring interviews with his own parents. Jarvis Cocker's contribution comes in the form of Melt, a documentary about the Sheffield steel industry, and Jeremy Deller has made a film about eccentric 87-year-old avant-gardist Bruce Lacey.

For Claypole, who has worked with Deller before, the participation of people like him in the business of arts documentary-making is vital for the form as it seeks to stretch and renew. "We learned a lot from Jeremy," he says. "Television can become locked in its own format and it's really important that we work with artists to find new ways of telling stories and doing things."

The archive strand, meanwhile, dips into the BBC's inestimable back catalogue to pluck out a few treasures for a public airing, in this case on screen at the CCA, though Claypole is keen to continue digitising as much of the archive as possible for release online. Digital offerings of all sorts, he says, will soon rank alongside radio and television as a "third pillar" of BBC programming.

"The BBC archive is a source of frustration and joy," he admits. "Frustration because it can be very heard to track things down. The joy is that you never stop discovering things in there that were thought lost, or which have never been seen since … Extraordinary and wonderful things turn up."

Recent trawls found an interview with 1960s media philiosopher Marshall McLuhan that was never broadcast and an interview with psychoanalyst Karl Jung thought lost.

Other finds illustrate to Claypole the importance of editors continuing to take leaps of faith, such as he did recently in a Glasgow-produced film about "conceptual taxidermist" Polly Morgan for the strand What Do Artists Do All Day? An example he gives is one of the last episodes of Monitor, the BBC arts series that ran until 1965. The editor at the time was Jonathan Miller.

"He commissioned a young artist who nobody had ever heard of to make a film about his work. It went out and, for a joke, they implied that the artist had died at a tragically young age. Eighteen years later that artist published Lanark and suddenly what you have is this amazing film, made in 1964, which is Alasdair Gray's life and work at a time when very few people had heard of him."

Last month the plug was pulled on another Glasgow-based arts programme, The Review Show. Claypole won't be drawn on the future of BBC Four, which has also been tipped for the axe, preferring instead to stress what he calls the BBC's new "brief": "to breathe new air into our arts coverage and get out and about in the country, reflecting back at the country that passion for the arts that is clearly there". His words follow the announcement by BBC Director General Tony Hall - made, ironically, in the same week The Review Show was pulled - of a major new investment in arts programming that promises "the strongest commitment to the arts in a generation".

Time will tell. But if Art Screen forms part of that commitment then on first showing at least it looks like a promise worth holding them to.

Art Screen runs from April 10-13 at GFT and CCA as part of Glasgow International 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/events/ebdwrz