Thomas Sutcliffe: Fictional art does no credit to anyone

Something rather odd happens when you encounter a work of art nested inside a work of art. What I have in mind is a fictional creation inside a fiction – rather than an allusion to an artwork that has an independent life of its own – and I've encountered two examples just recently. The first was in Alan Rickman's new production of Strindberg's Creditors at the Donmar Warehouse – in which one of the characters is a troubled artist who has just abandoned oil paints for sculpture, convinced that this is the only medium in which he can produce the work of the future. The second was in Julian Jarrold's film version of Brideshead Revisited, in which Charles Ryder rather implausibly holds a private view of his new jungle paintings on an ocean liner steaming between New York and London.

And the first thing to say about all these imaginary artworks is that they didn't look terribly good. In Creditors, Adolphe triumphantly unveils a kind of Rodin-esque open-crotch shot – a kneeling woman leaning back with her legs apart – while the results of Charles's painting expedition to the South American jungle are a set of sub-Sutherland oils depicting a swirl of lianas and palm leaves. And, in both cases, the quality of the art on show creates a slightly distracting intrusion. Are we supposed to think that Adolphe is a terrible artist, I wondered when his sculpture was revealed? And is it significant that Charles Ryder is riding high on the London art scene with paintings that we suspect would actually have been pictorial also-rans?

It isn't an easy problem to steer around, this. It's not theoretically inconceivable that an artwork created as a prop might turn out to be as good, or even better, than the work in which it is simply a bit of naturalistic furniture (indeed, this may actually have occurred, though I can't think of an example). But it's pretty unlikely – and the idea in itself seems to offend some unwritten rule of Russian-doll ordering, in which larger should never fit inside smaller.

What's more, if the prop-art was too good, it might awkwardly draw attention away from the creation in which it sat – exacerbating an effect which always occurs anyway. Just as a television screen depicted on a cinema screen will always maddeningly draw the eye to what is being shown on it, an artwork within an artwork exercises a kind of parasitic exploitation of our instincts to assess what is in front of us. It's there to add to the realism of the moment – but part of the reality of artworks is that we almost always ask whether they're any good or not. And, while you can't sit on a prop-chair in a film (if you're in the audience, that is), you can nevertheless look at a prop-sculpture or prop-painting, just as you would do if it was real.

It's this, I think, that sets up the uncomfortable frisson that occurs when we're allowed to see the results of a fictional character's creativity rather than having it tactfully occluded. Our sense of perspective suddenly gets a knock, because something that is supposed to be little more than background in-fill looms forward in a strangely disconcerting way. We know we shouldn't be focusing on it as if it was in the foreground but we can't – for a short while at least – prevent ourselves from doing just that.

It's better, really, for the veil to stay in place or the canvas to be left with its back to us – so that our imaginations can fill the blank with work that is precisely as good, or bad, as it needs to be.

Reductio ad absurdum

Sitting on the Tube the other day I noticed a new poster for the London production of Chicago. "London's sexiest musical", read the copyline. And then, beneath that, in type of equal size, "Show-stopping smooth legs by Philips Epilators". It was, I guess, an example of what businesspeople like to call branding synergy, a logical exploitation of a show that markets itself largely on the promise of great gams in fishnets. But I did wonder what might happen if the practice spread to less tractable drama. Posters for the new production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land could reasonably carry an approving label for Johnny Walker Red Label. Purdey, the gunmakers, might boldly underwrite Ivanov, which begins and ends with the bang of a shotgun. But surely only the marriage guidance organisation Relate could find a marketing opportunity in Creditors – an evening which, I suspect, will leave more than one married couple in need of outside intervention.

The new Saatchi gallery, just off London's King's Road has taken the admirable step of displaying its first exhibition without the usual protective ropes, trusting to the good manners of its visitors not to get too close. Curiously, it also features a piece that presents exactly the opposite problem – an installation by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in which life-sized figures of geriatric men in electric wheelchairs mill around a basement room. It must be a rare instance of a gallery having to fret about the art bumping into the spectators, rather than the other way round.

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