Abstract: Social art history is one of the most popular approaches to writing art history in the English-speaking context. T. J. Clark, who has been viewed as the leading scholar of social art history, introduced such discourses as “ideology”, “class,” and “production” into the writing of early French modern art history, seeking to interpret the relation of “vision-context” between ideology and social context. It is interesting to note that, when the social art history was in its heyday, Clark did not continue on its path, but proposed to “negatively” evaluate modern art. Once published, this view immediately triggered in the field of art writing (theory, criticism, art history) a fierce debate and reflection between modern art theory and historiography. During the debate, Clark constantly revised and changed the interpretation of “negation,” thus shaping a unique discursive mechanism, which has driven the construction from the opposite position in social art history and become an important logic and endogenous force in the evolution of modern Western aesthetics.

Key words: negativity; social art history, modernity, art writing