This article seeks to contribute to a better understating of the relationship between aesthetics and fundamental human rights. The initial challenge was to develop a more clarified conception of aesthetics as a social process in order to better mark those aspects of aesthetics that have clear human rights implications. This required us to contextualize the aesthetics process in terms of the generally accepted model of communications theory, and then to deepened the inquiry using this model as the broad architectural foundation for unpacking the social process of aesthetics. These ideas were put into the context of significant contributions from the specialists in this field to deepen the understanding of the nature of the social process of aesthetics. We saw in the literature the importance of personality, including both conscious and unconscious components of personality orientation. This stressed the uniqueness and individuation as well as creativity of aesthetics rooted in individual creativity. This initial step was then placed into the context of the autonomous appraiser of art, which process is an important part of the social construction of the meaning of artistic contribution. Therefore, the process of aesthetics involves an inter-determining relationship between the individual creator, the autonomous appraiser, and the larger cultural context. The foundation of the social process is essentially the interrelationship between personality and culture. References to such figures, as Pater and Freud, provide us with a deeper explanation of the psycho-socio dimensions of this process. It became apparent, therefore, that placing the social process in the context of the fundamental values behind modern human rights implied complexity in attempting to isolate a discrete aesthetic (as value)/institutional process specialized to the promotion of this value. Rather, an understanding of aesthetics as a value requires an integration of components and institutions of all the human rights values. We demonstrate toward the end of the article what such an approach might look like. The article also contains concrete examples of the contextual reality of artistic representation and the values it implicates. We have drawn on the works of Picasso as well as the classical works of high quality film. These were used to illustrate the ubiquity of value implications in aesthetics. We have also drawn on efforts to drive aesthetics into political propaganda, and the dangers that this poses for human rights and human dignity. The last part of the article provides a survey of activity in international decision-making fora in seeking to clarify and ground the values of culture and the arts in concrete institutional decision-making. This development underlines that the agenda reminds a largely unfinished one. The article concludes by providing a provisional value-by-value explanation of the relationship of aesthetics to all the principal human rights values, that in the aggregate establish the idea of universal human dignity. We would submit that our article represents only an initial step in the full exploration of this challenging issue and we hope that other scholars will be attracted to this issue as an important matter for fuller, interdisciplinary, scholarly exploration.