This passage from SPIN's review of Daft Punk's "Random Access Memories" grabbed my attention:

Indeed, the whole thing is so outsized and overwrought, so flailing and flamboyant, that you kind of have to grade it on a curve, alongside such other marvels of media spectacle as The Wall, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Avatar, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, etc. It belongs in that Musical Museum of WTF, maybe not front and center, but perhaps over by the rest rooms, next to the Use Your Illusions. It's the increasingly rare widescreen collision of talent, resources, and ham-fisted quackery that we just don't get very often these days, and it's in that sense that Daft Punk best accomplish their goal of evoking all these bygone decades, the days of Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's, Rumours and Thriller and Songs in the Key of Life, the days when making records literally drove people insane.

I started to think of artists who were never the same after their masterworks. The last artist I can think of was D'Angelo after "Voodoo". Before that is the unmistakeable breakdown of Lauryn Hill after "Miseducation". Then I have to go back even further to possibly George Michael after "Faith". My question is does album art when done to such lofty goals take too much out of their artists? Would we ever see such emotional vulnerablility from such pros as Knowles, Timberlake and Keys? Is suffering conductive to good art?