The Brooklyn Rail

It was one of those pre-Christmas evenings when everyone is back in town and time starts to loosen. We met over a glass of wine in an old-school bar in Rome—a place shaped by years of artists and thinkers passing through—when the word “radical” slipped into the conversation. Friends drifted in, glasses refilled, and our table turned into an improvised forum circling one question: “What is radical?”

What immediately emerged is that this word, punctuating news headlines and exhibition press releases—the ultimate clickbait today—is anything but a shared concept. As answers splintered in a dozen directions, one thing seemed to unite everyone: the pressure to take a position, as if defining or confronting “radical” were itself an ideological test.

By the end of the night, we realized that this seemingly straightforward question could open into a larger project—not to pin the term down with a definition, but to let it unfold. What fascinated us was its ambivalence: its uses, misuses, histories, politicization, trends, and the ways it has been claimed to hold power—or to hold on to a dream, often defining positions that came to capture the zeitgeist of their era.

In the spirit of that first conversation, we invited a group of cultural initiators—artists, curators, gallerists, writers, critics, and researchers—to answer the question, “What is radical?” The only prompt being to situate it in the present, allowing responses to reflect each contributor’s background and lived experience as active participants in contemporary discourse.

This selection is not meant to be definitive or comprehensive, but a set of voices shaped by our own curiosities and intuition, as curators. We offer these different perspectives as a way to keep the question unfolding—a snapshot of what it means to be radical in our present moment.