# Chapter6 **Opening (not a real abstract):** It may seem from the discussion so far that I take distributed attention to be some kind of cultural universal: a way of attending that is hard-wired in us for our enjoyment of things aesthetic and that can be found in all cultures and all historical periods. The aim of this chapter is to make it clear that this is not my view. In fact, we may have strong reasons to think that the kind of distributed attention that plays such an important role in a wide variety of aesthetic phenomena, such as aesthetic experiences, uniqueness, picture perception and appreciation is a historically relatively novel phenomenon and it may also take very different forms in different cultures. I will address this issue through the ‘history of vision’ debate: the debate in art history and aesthetics about whether vision has a history. According to an influential view within art history,