The success of any artist is relative. Any album which topped the charts in seven countries, featured an international top 10 single and was the ninth best-selling album of its release year would surely be considered a success. That is, unless you’re one of the most well-known pop stars on the planet and your new record sold less than a quarter of your previous album’s copies in its first week. Enter ARTPOP, the bearer of the brand of Lady Gaga’s ‘flop era’, with one of the most interesting stories of development and disappointment of the past decade.

Lady Gaga’s 2013 had a rough start. She was forced to cancel the final leg of her Born This Way Ball tour after sustaining a hip injury which required surgery from the strenuous dancing the show involved. She had no choice but to take a six-month hiatus from performing to recover and dove into classical literature and music to distract herself. Though ideas for her third album had been swirling since the release of Born This Way, the vision for ARTPOP was crystallised in those months of rest. No longer concurrently promoting her previous work, for the first time Gaga was able to reflect on her creative choices and bring her inspirations to full realisation.

Gaga had always been known for her ambition, whether it was producing a 14-minute self-directed music video for a four-minute pop song or wearing a meat dress down the MTV red carpet, but with ARTPOP she soared to new creative heights. She planned for ARTPOP to be a multimedia project rather than a simple album, complete with an accompanying app, a high-fashion premiere event, and multiple volumes. In early 2013 she recruited famed sculptor Jeff Koons into the project who would go on to create the nude sculpture of Gaga featured on the album cover. Her musical partners included producers Madeon, DJ White Shadow, and Zedd, all of whom she had worked with before, as well as will.i.am, who she was collaborating with for the first time. The ARTPOP project was a mishmash of past and future for Gaga, pushing ahead with a bold creative mindset while holding on to those who had helped her attain success with her previous albums. Perhaps this boundless ambition was what prevented ARTPOP from feeling like a true success story.

Trouble began looming for ARTPOP when Troy Carter, Gaga’s manager since 2007, parted ways with her a week after the album was released, citing ‘creative differences’. The app, developed by the same team behind the accompanying app for Björk’s Biophilia, was released the same day as ARTPOP but the bonus content promised by Gaga, including extra songs which didn’t make it to the final tracklist, never materialised. The lead single, ‘Applause’, hit the top five on the US charts but underperformed compared to previous hits and was beaten to the top by Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’, released the same week. Subsequent promotion was always in the shadow of Gaga’s past success: her ArtRave tour grossed significantly less than her previous tours and the album’s final single, ‘G.U.Y.’, remains Gaga’s second lowest-charting single in the United States.

By far the most significant unfulfilled promise related to ARTPOP was its fabled second volume. After teasing that she wanted to release ARTPOP Act II before going on tour so she could perform them both, Gaga went radio silent on the topic after 2014. Leaked tracks from ARTPOP’s recording sessions, including ‘Brooklyn Nights’, ‘Onion Girl’, and ‘Princess Die’, have become fan favourites despite never seeing an official release. While the sequel to ARTPOP had an almost mythic appeal among her fanbase, the legacy of Gaga’s third album became stained in the years after its release by some of the men she worked with.

Not all of this album’s songs should be celebrated though. The second single from ARTPOP, ‘Do What U Want’, features rapper R. Kelly, who even at the time was known for his predatory behaviour. Gaga defended him when promoting the song, and even performed with him at the 2013 American Music Awards in a JFK-Marilyn Monroe scenario. After the documentary Surviving R. Kelly was released in January 2019 Gaga apologised for collaborating with Kelly and removed the song from digital and physical versions of the record. The only version of the track now available on streaming services is a remix with Christina Aguilera. Gaga also attracted criticism for working with photographer Terry Richardson, who shot the cover art for several ARTPOP singles and worked on the music video for ‘Do What U Want’ which was ultimately never released. Richardson has been accused of sexual misconduct by numerous models since 2001 and has not actively worked since 2018. Rapper T.I., who was featured on the song “Jewels N’ Drugs”, has also been accused of sexual abuse by more than 30 women.

Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP has a complicated history plagued by bad business decisions, broken promises, and questionable collaborations. That doesn’t mean the project as a whole should be written off as a dip in Gaga’s appeal, especially given the resurgence of the album in recent years. In April 2021 a petition to release the second volume of ARTPOP garnered over 20,000 signatures in a single day after DJ White Shadow tweeted an April Fool’s joke about releasing Act II. He shared the petition’s success with Gaga and commented that he was ‘sure she will be okay with revisiting it one day and building on it when the time is right’ but recognised the ARTPOP era was a ‘hard time’ for her. Gaga said that the creation of the album was ‘like heart surgery’ and that she and her team had ‘always believed it was ahead of its time’. In response to Gaga acknowledging the petition, fans got ARTPOP to number one on iTunes in 18 countries eight years after its release. With the 10-year anniversary approaching in November of this year, fans are anxious to see if Gaga will do something special for a record which seemed to be a stumble in her mighty career. Is it worth dredging up the flack she received a decade ago to please her dedicated fanbase?