An Irishman's Diary

I’M ALL FOR “monetising” Irish culture, as the Global Economic Forum wants us to do. But we have to learn to walk before we run. And while monetising the culture may be a worthy, long-term goal, surely a more realistic approach would be to try and manetise it first.

I mean, in a country so long dominated by the literary and musical arts, you can't expect to create a vibrant visual aesthetic overnight. As any good art student could knows, Monet didn't grow on trees, never mind come out of nowhere. Like the rest of the Impressionists, he built on the ideas of Manet, whose bold brush-strokes and equally bold subject matter were seen in such pre-Impressionist masterworks as Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

Of course, Manet in his turn was influenced by Courbet and Delacroix, and before them by Velasquez and Goya. But I don’t want to put the Forum lads off completely. They have to start somewhere. And their original Luncheon on the Grass – up in Farmleigh two years ago – should point the way forward.

Speaking of grass, there are those who believe that Monet’s garden at Giverny was and remains his greatest masterpiece. Having spent an enraptured afternoon in it once, I would almost agree. In any case, the garden was inextricably mixed up with the art,

since it provided much of his subject matter and was a studio too.

But usefully, it also serves to remind the more snobbish art types among us that culture and horticulture are not mutually exclusive. That’s why

I think Teagasc should be involved in any Irish Monet project.

Cynics might suggest that the only things the Irish visual aesthetic and French Impressionism have in common is that they’re both best viewed by scrunching your eyes up and standing well back. Shame on them, I say. Now that Dublin has a Swiss-style tram system and a cycle network rivalling Copenhagen’s, there’s no reason we can’t introduce monetisation of the arts too. After that we can push on to post-impressionism and beyond. But maybe I’m taking the Pissarro now.

ON A COMPLETELY different question, meanwhile – whether Irish culture be harnessed for economic benefit – there was encouraging news this week from one of our traditionally stronger branches of the arts: music. Yes, congratulations to the great Van Morrison, whose 1967 hit Brown-Eyed Girlhas just joined a very select group of records by clocking up 10 million air-plays on US radio.

It couldn't have happened to a better song: or to a better three-minute song anyway. Brown-Eyed Girlis a 24-carat pop classic: a marriage of lyrical and musical perfection that you cannot listen to without being uplifted.

And yet, almost every news report of the milestone was slightly marred by a quote from Van – a man who, when measured on the seven-dwarf personality spectrum test, has always been somewhere between Bashful and Grumpy – suggesting BEGwas not one of his best. "I've got about 300 songs that I think are better," he said.

Well, all right. It's the prerogative of artists to talk down their earlier work, which often casts a shadow on the rest of their careers. And leaving BEGto one side a moment, it is almost a tragedy that such a long and distinguished solo career as Van's should have begun, all of 43 years ago, with his masterpiece, the debut album Astral Weeks.

That he could have followed up something as sunny and cheerful as BEGwith a brooding collection of songs about love and death and the plight of ageing transvestites, all invested with a depth of emotion that can still make listeners feel like they're intruding on private grief, is proof enough of the man's genius. But that he was only 23 when the album came out is still hard to credit.

Yes, he had a lifetime of music already behind him, and a string of bands including the brilliant Them, whose comet-like career was over before Van was old enough to vote. Even so, Astral Weekswas the sort of album (not that it is a sort of album – there's been nothing like it before or since) that an artist should make in early middle age: perhaps just after getting divorced or before finding religion and releasing a long series of increasingly eccentric records.

But enough about Dylan. As for Van, after his follow-up album Moondance– a classic of an entirely different kind – it was inevitable that there would be an evening-out of his musical output in the 1970s and later. And although his trumpet-like voice remains in pristine condition, even now, there has been a certain homogeneity to his music in recent decades.

That's why his dismissal of BEGseems a little harsh. Van's detractors might counter that, rather than write 300 better songs, it would be truer to say he's written the same song 300 times. But that would be harsh too. I prefer to think of his later career in terms of Monet's: so that, although he may be painting the same haystack or cathedral over and over, he's doing it each time in a slightly different light.