If languages survived or broke in the Americas depending on the survival and maintenance of speech communities, the same rules did not apply to aesthetics. Unlike languages, which are “hard” and difficult to change quickly, aesthetic principles are “soft” and can be changed much quicker. If aesthetic standards change between cultures, and indeed between social classes or fractions within a given culture, the idea of the creation of beauty and the idea that there is such a thing as beauty is universal. Recent research in neuroaesthetics suggests that all humans have a capacity to appreciate beauty, and aesthetic reactions to natural phenomena and deliberate human creations have measurable physiological manifestations. Indeed, the appearance of artistic representations, which began at least 100,000 years ago in Africa, is widely held as one of the clear markers of the brain reorganization that signals the emergence of our species from others.

If all humans can experience physiologically measurable responses to aesthetic production, it is also clear that cultural elements play a determining role in the specificity of the reaction. It is also clear that art, music, or decoration can be appreciated without the long process required for a child to learn language. Aesthetic elements can be mixed, resorted or redeployed, but languages cannot – no one would understand a person who mixes vocabulary and grammar from multiple languages in the same sentence. Whereas native proficiency in languages is really only acquired in childhood, people can easily learn to appreciate new aesthetics at any point in their lifetime. If a multilingual sentence would be gibberish, a performance or object that drew simultaneously on several cultures might easily be appreciated by everyone.