Pink’s new album, Hurts 2B Human, has quite the album artwork – a multicoloured painting of the pop star gazing into the distance, either thinking philosophical thoughts or just congratulating herself on saving two whole letters on the album cover by using text speak from the early 00s. The result is very GCSE art final coursework but, fair play to her, after seven album-cover photoshoots, she’s probably running out of ideas.

Pink is not the first pop star to put an arty twist on an album cover – a little-known band called the Beatles used Klaus Voormann’s sketch of the band on their Revolver album – but the recent trend seems to be less “experimental German artist on LSD” and more “draw me like one of your French girls”.

Predictably, it’s had varying degrees of success. There’s Lorde’s incredible Melodrama album cover, which features a haunting painting of the singer lying on a bed, by Brooklyn artist Sam McKinniss. Then there’s Troye Sivan’s amazing Blue Neighbourhood cover by Taiwanese illustrator Hsiao-Ron Cheng. Anastacia’s A 4 App album exhibits the singer in a space-themed explosion of colour, while Christina Aguilera’s Bionic album portrait has definite “community art project painted on the side of a youth centre” vibes.

As anyone who’s watched MTV Cribs can attest, hip-hop stars in particular love to display huge pictures of themselves, and sitting for a portrait as if you’re royalty definitely requires some level of ego. Detroit artist Sixmau literally painted J Cole as a king for last year’s album KOD, and Kanye West worked with artist George Condo for a series of covers for his Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album. Chance the Rapper has had not one but three digital portraits done by artist Brandon Breaux for his mixtapes. Everyone loved Tyler, the Creator’s Scum Fuck Flower Boy cover by surrealist artist Eric White, but Quavo’s insane cover for his solo record Quavo Huncho, by Canadian artist Mihailo Andic went viral after fans hated it.

So why the boom in portraiture? Maybe stars know that photos will be run through so many layers of Photoshop, they’ll barely recognise themselves anyway, so why not have a flattering painting done and skip the shoot? Maybe artists realise that on streaming sites it’s unlikely that listeners will spend more than a few seconds looking at the album cover – enough to press play on Spotify and that’s it – or maybe it’s the opposite and they’re desperate for fans to display their vinyl album covers like art. Ego trip or time-saving shortcut? Either way, well done Pink for getting artwork to hang in the downstairs loo and billing it to the record company.

Pink’s Hurts 2B Human is released on Friday 26 April