In 1975, Susan Sontag asserted that “beauty is a form of power,” but added a serious qualification: “It is not the power to do, but the power to attract. It is a power that negates itself.” Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is a “power” that can be given and taken away. And, she elaborated, one must work hard to stay beautiful—by shopping, preening, dieting, and concealing signs of aging. So beauty hardly constitutes freedom; rather, it entraps you in a loop.

Sontag’s point was buzzing in my head all autumn as I gallery-hopped around New York, which was brimming with paintings of women by women—a sort of Feminist Figuration Fall, if you will. And I wondered if her point rang differently now, when attention is currency and the surest way to earn it—to break through the algorithm—is with pictures of hot girls.

A debate about whether and how beauty is power has cropped up perennially since the dawn of feminist art. In the 1970s, artists like Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke got flak from more than one feminist critic for using their nude bodies in performances and photographs, with Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis writing that such work “ends up by reinforcing what it intends to subvert.”