3. Experience and attention

Abstract

What all things aesthetic have in common is something very simple: the way you’re exercising your attention. What you are attending to makes a huge difference to your experience in general. It can completely ruin your experience or it can make your experience even more rewarding. And in some cases, it can directly confront you with how differently the same artwork appears to you depending on what you’re attending to. ‘Experience and attention’ discusses the difference attention makes, the focus of your attention, the different ways of attending (focused or distributed), the freedom of perception, and the ways of attending to the relation between the experienced object and the quality of our experience.