My watershed moment in understanding the relationship between art and feminism came when I read John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Women, he wrote (miraculously spot-on for a man, I thought at the time), walk around with the equivalent of a camera trained on them, and at all times they are aware of what they look like. "Whilst she is walking across a room," he wrote, "or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually."

I thought about Berger as I walked through Annie Leibovitz's Women--a series of 70 images of famous and ordinary women--trying to formulate why a show that claims to be so all-inclusive felt so philosophically bankrupt. Certainly the show succeeds in forcing viewers to examine how they see, and how they judge what they see. But there is a feeling of having been meddled with, of an overweening hand manipulating the argument but failing to manipulate it in any interesting way.

Is this about how Leibovitz sees women, or about how they want to be seen? The point seems to be that women, despite their evident diversity, still fall prey to stereotypes, and the stereotypes are the fault of the viewer more than the viewed. But the rhetoric here is so pre-fab that the show doesn't rise above the labels, no matter how noble.

I was told that Leibovitz insisted on certain pairings of photographs, ostensibly to inspire new thinking. Two portraits of battered women are therefore hung next to a bodybuilder flexing her delts and lats--a juxtaposition of victimization and empowerment. This doesn't seem to be terribly revolutionary; in fact, it seems merely tired. The thinking it inspires, in fact, is more cynical: Women can beef themselves up and be as destructive and stupid as men.

Another of Women's agendas--so obvious it's almost embarrassing--is to show various and unorthodox images of beauty, contrasting (for example) a beatific image of Gwyneth Paltrow and Blythe Danner with a nude shot of performance artist Jennifer Miller, a woman with a full beard. The image of Miller is one of the show's best, with her frank and unyielding gaze, like a dare. That women are beautiful and interesting in different ways is hardly news; that these arbitrary standards are reinforced by popular culture is a yawn. Finally, that it's presented as a groundbreaking set of contrasts is a little insulting.

I was unhappy to learn that when Leibovitz arrived to photograph Osceola McCarty, a black woman in Mississippi who saved enough of her meager income to endow a university scholarship, the photographer talked McCarty out of the gown and wig she was wearing and encouraged her to wear her everyday housedress, a "simple" dress for a "simple" woman. It would have been more interesting, and a great deal more instructive, to see what are the wages of fame, and how they filter down through the classes. Taken in this spirit, the portrait of Oprah Winfrey on the steps of a Mississippi shack seems disingenuous, a claim to authenticity, when her fame is based on her power.

And can we truly say that Leibovitz's image of three wealthy Houston socialites confers no judgment on the subjects? They appear strained, bleached-out, and posed over their elegant teacups. I believe this is intended to be read as somehow less honorable--although all three women are active in local charities and arts organizations--than the image next to it of Karen Fedrau, a farmer in California who seems unhappy to have been interrupted, mid-hoeing, for the photograph.

None of this is to say that these are not good photographs; they are, and some of them are terrifically beautiful (the image of Louise Bourgeois is a minor masterpiece). But the photographs-as-objects take a definite back seat to their content, and this is underscored by an apparent indifference to quality: All of them are digital prints tiled together to make large-as-life images. There is a consequent (if slight) blurring, and the disjointed effect of having a seam running right through them. This tells me that Leibovitz was more interested in rhetoric than in art, an unhappy claim for a show that aims so low, and will be seen by so many.