Art's Animating Principal?

Here's a hint, it's probably got little to do with Abstraction, except as it's relation as the object cause of desire (Objet 'a)

Why did so few gallery patrons stare at the 'real' as hard as they did at the 'abstract'? It's almost as if they were pretending not to notice that the woman was nude, so constrained by the social-symbolic of culture as they were.