I didn't expect to see a work that would knock my socks off at Collision Course, part two of the GSK Contemporary season at the Royal Academy. I didn't expect to enjoy much at all. I thought the first part of this exhibition that wants to feel like a happening was the most vapid, pretentious and boring art event of the previous 12 months. I've been getting a lot more tolerant of this contemporary art lark recently, but the turgid emptiness of this affair really brought out my deepest suspicions that it's all a load of cobblers.

And yet ? part two turns out to be much better. It's far more of an exhibition, with some, y'know, works of art in it. The William Burroughs retrospective (as I moaned yesterday) left me cold but the rest is all quite interesting. And one part of the show ? a mini-exhibition called Sudden White (After London) curated by Mark Beasley ? is more than that. It's a wintry apocalyptic glimpse of some unexpected and powerful art. Above all, it includes a stupendous cinema-scale, Pollock-wide Photoshopped phantasmagoria by John Russell.

Ocean Pose (Pink) is the digital marriage of Peter Paul Rubens and Jeff Koons in the mind of a mad sea god. Floating over a purple sea, a white unicorn stands enfurled in an expanding cosmic cloud of giant octopus tentacles. Bloody viscera, action-painting smears of goo and the baroque curves and shadows of the coiling gastropod limbs create one of the most exciting and perversely joyous, yet at the same time mad and disconcerting, new works of British art I've seen in ages.

Russell has a sensibility that consumes and expels the stuff of contemporary life with orgiastic abandon. His art is painterly without being painting and pictorial without being a picture. It is more exciting than street art. It does definitely invite comparison with Koons's food paintings as a hyperbolic overactive pop monstrosity. But it has its own high-art, 17th-century quality that makes it hugely original and hugely striking. I urge you to visit part two of this mélange of an event, if only to see this stupendous work by one of the most important artists of early 21st-century Britain.

After just five years, the romance between the football club owner and the little dancer is over: a rare sculpture by Degas is up for sale again ? this time with a £12m transfer fee on her head.

The current owner, Sir John Madejski, was knighted in the New Year honours list for lavish philanthropy, such as donating millions of pounds to create a new courtyard garden at the V&A museum and to restore the Fine Rooms, now named in his honour, at the Royal Academy.

The art collector is better known in football circles for steering his club, Reading, into the Premier League last year, and paying most of the £25m cost of its new stadium. The club was relegated last season.

He insists his decision to part company with the sculpture is no credit crunch sale, saying merely that he is moving on: "My collection is constantly evolving and developing into new areas."

He bought the Degas, Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (the little 14-year-old dancer) for £5m in 2004, at the height of the art boom. It is one of a handful of bronze casts still in private ownership of the only sculpture Degas exhibited in his lifetime, when the girl's tired but defiant stance and wrinkled tights were seen as shockingly realistic.

Despite the now faltering market, Sotheby's predicts the piece will now make up to £12m. "This is a market for masterpieces," said Melanie Clore, head of the auctioneer's impressionist department.

The curious thing about the Fifth Floor at Tate Liverpool is that lifts only go up to four. But the idea has been to create a "social space full of imagination and invention", based on conversations with the public about what they want to see.

There are many compelling reasons for creating art, though filling galleries by focus group is not among them. The show is intended to form the final word on Liverpool's year as European capital of culture: though if this range of half-realised concepts is anything to go by, 2009 has arrived not a minute too late.

Paul Rooney's banal, low-budget movies seem to be everywhere at present - he's among the finalists for the Northern Art prize in Leeds - and here he shows a group of maudlin standup comedians running through their routines in a derelict cinema. It's hard to be sure whose jokes are the worst: the comedians' or the artist's.

Peter Liversidge has lined the walls with 120 type-written proposals for the show, seemingly on the principle that the more times you enter, the more chance you might win. Some of the more manageable ideas involve neon sculptures and a choir of schoolchildren singing Jingle Bells. It will be interesting to see how the Tate realises some of the others, which include freezing the Mersey and releasing gorillas in Sefton Park.

Much of the art places an embarrassing emphasis on audience participation. There's a space for making Christmas decorations and a mock-up of a TV studio so you can pretend to read the news. Tino Sehgal's piece involves agreeing to participate in a discussion for which the artist pledges to pay a nominal sum. I left three quid richer but not much better off.

The most overrated cultural icon of the late 20th century has just come grinding back into town, words trailing like bloody tendrils, gears shifting lugubriously, voice stentorian as ever. Death warmed up. If you have spent the last few years wishing old William Burroughs was still around, good news! He is currently filling acres of gallery space in part two of GSK Contemporary at the Royal Academy. Personally, I could do without him when he was alive and I can do without him now. I just hope his attempted resurrection doesn't disprove my theory.

The theory is as follows. Some cultural figures achieve vast proportions in their lifetime not so much by their works as their voice, attitude, persona. This is a phenomenon we take for granted in popular culture but it has a more ambiguous and often more pernicious effect in the "high" arts. It can be extraordinarily difficult to separate work and personage when someone is giving interviews, posing for photographs, being a cult. Then death comes, and the talent's true size is revealed. Derek Jarman may have been interesting but are any of his films worth watching again? Joseph Beuys? Genius! Beuys's works get better and better as the intrusive image of the man himself fades. Harold Pinter? It's still too soon for that one.

Burroughs is the modern writer adored by people who don't read enough modern writing. Everything he did was done better by others. Above all, I don't see how anyone's adolescent admiration for the Burroughs prose machine can survive an encounter with the novels of Thomas Pynchon - the true, dazzling titan of the avant garde novel in our time. Pynchon's marvellous sentences and immense, arcing fictions have all the wit, richness and humanity (even in their utter strangeness) that Burroughs lacks.

What does the exhibition at the Royal Academy do to champion him? It includes artworks by him - but these all turn out to be narcissistic self-portraits or paintings that allude to his spooky, gun-totin' persona. Ah yes, the guns. Still vaunting your gunmanship after shooting someone dead is ... what? Psychotic? Shallow? Either way it doesn't need this or any more outings. Forget him, he's gone. Maybe he was never all there.

As ever, Damien Hirst produces a surprise (some are nasty, this is nice) - a collaged portrait of Burroughs made with what was presumably an expensive collection of literary ephemera. David Hockney's plain portait is touching, too, and makes me wish Hockney was still in California where his blunt realism has such a piquant relationship with American raw material. But still, these again are portraits - so what survives of Burroughs? Real art? Or just an image?

Or a voice. In the exhibition only Burroughs' voice, delivering his bitter Thanksgiving Prayer, cuts into you. That voice - that voice!

But a voice is all he was.

For those, like me, who come from Stoke-on-Trent, it is a sad day. Unless, as is hoped, a buyer can be found, it could be the end of the great pottery manufacturer Wedgwood. And yet the news that Waterford-Wedgwood is going into receivership comes as no surprise. The death-throes of the firm have been long, slow and agonising. In 1908 Arnold Bennett, the great chronicler of the Five Towns of the North Staffordshire Potteries, could write this in the first chapter of his masterpiece, The Old Wives' Tale:

"[The Five Towns] are unique and indispensable because you cannot drink tea out of a teacup without the aid of the Five Towns; because you cannot eat a meal in decency without the aid of the Five Towns. For this the architecture of the Five Towns is an architecture of ovens and chimneys; for this its atmosphere is as black as its mud; for this it burns and smokes all night, so that Longshaw has been compared to hell; for this it is unlearned in the ways of agriculture, never having seen corn except as packing straw and in quartern loaves; for this, on the other hand, it comprehends the mysterious habits of fire and pure, sterile earth; for this it lives crammed together in slippery streets where the housewife must change white window-curtains at least once a fortnight if she wishes to remain respectable; for this it gets up in the mass at six a.m., winter and summer, and goes to bed when the public-houses close; for this it exists--that you may drink tea out of a teacup and toy with a chop on a plate. All the everyday crockery used in the kingdom is made in the Five Towns--all, and much besides."

A century later, and it is as if Bennett were writing about another world. There are few factories belching smoke in Stoke these days. In my childhood in the 1970s and 80s, brick bottle kilns were a distinctive, but vanishing, and, in practical terms, obsolete feature of the Stoke landscape. Stoke still produced an enormous quantity of pottery, but less and less could it accurately be said that "all the everyday crockery used in the kingdom" had been made there. In the immediate postwar British period, it was still going strong: there's a wonderful 1947 public information film about the pottery industry by Terry Bishop called Five Towns, collected in the BFI documentaries box set Land of Promise. In 1978, when I was six, there were still 51,120 members of the ceramic workers' union. But in 2003, when I went back to Stoke to write about the closure of two Wedgwood factories and the loss of 1,000 jobs, there were 12,497. The second part of the 20th century had seen rising labour costs, takeovers by the big players (Wedgwood, Royal Doulton) of the hundreds of smaller operations in the area, and production gradually outsourced to the Far East (with, some would argue, a concomitant reduction in quality). Along with all that, there was a steep diminution in design values. In the 1950s, small but flourishing firms like Midwinter (which was eventually devoured by Wedgwood) had the imagination to employ brilliant designers such as the Burslem-trained genius Jessie Tait and the young Terence Conran. Midwinter's ware was cheerful, gorgeous to look at, handpainted, and affordable (in the early 1950s, my then hard-up parents had Tait's Red Domino, cheap as chips, as their first dinner service). Wedgwood itself, in the 1930s, commissioned the great Eric Ravilious to produce beautiful ware. This sense of imagination and delight seemed to fade away with the loss of the smaller firms and the growth into monoliths of Wedgwood and Doulton. Who has Wedgwood commissioned recently? Kelly Hoppen. No Ravilious she.

A tragedy. Only a few hopeful signs of life remain, in niche firms such as Emma Bridgewater and Burleigh. A great history and a fine tradition is being fast lost.