Add to ORKGFarewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism offers an opportunity to consider T.J. Clark’s contribution to the discipline of art history. Farewell transforms the polemical tone of the social history of art into to an elegy for modernism’s unrealized promise. Yet an attentive reading of its argument discloses a far more subtle intervention within recent attempts to revise the history of modernism. This paper will consider these issues through a discussion of Farewell, focusing of the performative dimension of Clark’s argument, which renders on a rhetorical level the aesthetic strategies of the modernist avant-garde. Clark’s program for the social history of art may remain unfulfilled, yet it is exemplary in this failure. Key w...