A centuries-old tradition encompassing philosophy, psychology and artistic practice has described aesthetic experiences as states characterized by heightened attention towards external stimuli. This study aims to give empirical substance to this idea, investigating whether aesthetic experiences might indeed prompt top-down, endogenous attentional enhancements. To do so, we will compare well-established electrophysiological indexes of attentional amplification during the execution of an aesthetic vs a pragmatic evaluation task, using both standard statistical analysis techniques and a machine learning algorithm. The upshot could be a clearer understanding of the “aesthetic attitude,” its neural markers, and its effects on the deployment of attentional resources.