Pictured: Jeff Koons' sculpture of Lady Gaga

In the increasingly out-of-control arms race of 2013 album pre-release campaigns, Lady Gaga's artRave was the A-bomb. Held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Sunday night, the event was ostensibly a release concert for Gaga’s new album ARTPOP, out this week. But it was also oh so much more*.* Part science fair, part costume ball, part sculpture exhibit, and part Warholian Happening, the artRave capped a year in which the music industry has gone to any and all lengths to attract attention to its artists, by any means necessary.-=-=-=-

Sure, elaborate album rollouts are nothing new. (Read Stephen Deusner's recent Pitch piece for a brief history of online campaigns in the past decade.) And labels and bands have been staging stunts since time immemorial. But 2013 has seen such a high concentration of gimmicks, treasure hunts, and "mysteries" that it's hard to imagine how this can all be sustainable—especially considering the fact that revenue streams for musicians are drying up exponentially with each passing day.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about Arcade Fire’s labyrinthine Reflektor campaign, the band's manager Scott Rodger said, "We're in an information overload, but just to be recognized you have to be more creative and do things in a way that people will talk about socially—online but also in the physical world. How do you become one of those things that people talk about?"

Well, one way to get people talking is to hold a bunch of journalists hostage on an airplane for seven days. The beginning of the current deluge can arguably be traced back to last fall's Rihanna 777 fiasco; perhaps, when the history books are written, we will look back on the 12 months between #RihannaPlane and #ArtRave as a kind of golden age of music advertising, and a TV show will be made about, oh I don't know, the millennial Don Draper who thought up Katy Perry's Prism truck.

Once Rihanna opened the floodgates, she was followed, to varying degrees, by Perry, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Boards of Canada, Jay-Z, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and countless others competing for ears, eyes, pageviews, likes, followers, and, of course, those rapidly dwindling dollars.

But more than any other current pop star, Lady Gaga understands the value of a good stunt. She's built her career on watercooler moments, from the meat dress to the "Telephone" video to that bonkers Thanksgiving special (soon to be repeated!) and beyond. Her ARTPOP promotion cycle has so far included tattooing the album name on her arm, getting fans to paint a mural of the tracklist, getting superstar artist Jeff Koons to make the album cover, getting naked in a video for the Marina Abramović Institute, creating an app to accompany the album, redesigning the USA Today logo, and, um, this.

All of which lead up to Sunday night: Lady Gaga dressed in a space suit, standing in a freezing cold warehouse on the East River waterfront, about to demonstrate a flying machine she and her team had invented.