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There are two kinds of beauty, free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) and merely accessory beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). Free beauty does not presuppose a concept of what the object is [meant] to be. Accessory beauty does presuppose such a concept, as well

Literature in the Art of Joseph Cornell (and Vice Versa)

John Ashbery opens his 1967 review of Joseph Cornell’s Guggenheim exhibition with two epigraphs. The first, from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, is uncannily and self-evidently appropriate: I loved stupid paintings, decorated transoms, stage sets, carnival booths, signs, popular engravings;