# Aesthetic Attention **Abstract:** The aim of this paper is to give a new account of the way we exercise our attention in some paradigmatic cases of aesthetic experience. I treat aesthetic experience as a specific kind of experience and, like in the case of other kinds of experiences, attention plays an important role in determining its phenomenal character. I argue that an important feature of at least some of our aesthetic experiences is that we exercise our attention in a specific, distributed, manner: our attention is focused on one perceptual object, but it is distributed among the various properties of this object. I argue that this way of exercising one’s attention is very different from the way we attend most of the time and it fits very well with some important features of paradigmatic examples of aesthetic experience. I. Introduction This paper does not aim to give a general account of aesthetic experience. I don’t think that there is one and only one kind of aesthetic experience; that it is a monolithic category. My suspicion is that we tend to call any strong (or intense, or emotionally significant) experience that we have in an aesthetic context ‘aesthetic experience’. But this can mean very different things: experiences of overwhelming beauty, experiences of strong emotions, experiences of strong identification with a fictional character, musical frissons, and so on. The aim of this paper is much more limited — I want to single out an important aspect of some paradigmatic cases of aesthetic exper **Authors:** [[Bence Nanay]]