Curator Focus: Eleonora Brizi

Every movement has its chroniclers— those who don’t just witness change, but shape how it will be remembered. In Web3, we once imagined a world without tastemakers — a decentralized field free from gatekeepers, hierarchies, and inherited authority. “Let the code curate,” we said. But the truth is more human: the space still needs those who care — who can hold chaos long enough to find coherence, and who can translate technological acceleration into cultural continuity.

The Book On-Chain project introduces Curator Focus, an ongoing series of conversations with the individuals who build bridges between code and culture. Each edition highlights a curator who has shaped the evolving landscape of digital art — not as a gatekeeper, but as a custodian of context.

We open the series with Eleonora Brizi, one of the first to take curating on-chain seriously, long before institutions learned the language of tokens. Her role is as contradictory as it is essential: she curates but doesn’t collect; she builds platforms yet critiques their models; she documents rebels while refusing to be canonized. In a world that celebrates decentralization, Brizi insists that curation — when done with integrity and transparency — is not an act of control but of care.

Her work reminds us that in any system, decentralized or not, someone still decides what deserves attention — and how it’s remembered. The difference is whether that decision is made in service of ego or of ecosystem.

Eleonora Brizi

Eleonora Brizi is a curator, translator, and cultural mediator whose work sits at the intersection of dissent and historical memory. She entered the crypto art space as someone who had spent years embedded in systems where the stakes of expression were life-defining. Her journey began in Beijing, where she worked for four years inside the studio of Ai Weiwei, at a time when surveillance was constant, exhibitions could be shut down overnight, and the simple act of artistic collaboration could carry political risk. It was there, surrounded by dissident artists and young Chinese staff navigating real consequences, that Eleonora developed the instincts that would shape her later work in crypto art.

When Eleonora arrived in the crypto space in 2018, she recognized something familiar: not the aesthetic, but the energy. Within weeks, she began archiving the Rare Pepe phenomenon, then widely dismissed, and co-created The Rarest Book, one of the first serious curatorial efforts to historicize early blockchain art through a cultural lens. Since then, her work has remained unusually grounded in geopolitics, cultural translation, and real-world access. She curated Renaissance 2.0 2.0. in Rome during the pandemic, building an exhibition of digital-native art inside a traditional space with no funding, little precedent, and minimal institutional support, yet drawing hundreds on opening night. She has spent the last few years traveling between Europe and China, where she is now developing a blockchain-specific Chinese vocabulary and working to understand how regulatory, linguistic, and infrastructural barriers shape who can participate in Web3.

Unlike many in the space, she doesn’t believe in artificial scarcity. She believes in access. She speaks the language of context, of curation, of culture. Her influence in crypto art is hard to quantify precisely because it isn’t extractive. It’s archival and found in the bridges she builds between artists and institutions, between East and West, and between a decentralized promise and its all-too-centralized reality.

Freedom as a Medium

When Eleonora Brizi first encountered crypto art, she wasn’t looking for blockchain. She wasn’t even looking for art. “I didn’t study art,” she says. “I studied Chinese and Chinese culture. But I was interested in art as a way to understand dissent.” That interest took her deep into China’s underground. Her university thesis focused on The Stars Art Group, a radical collective of artists in post-Mao Beijing who staged unsanctioned exhibitions in the streets. One of them was Wang Keping, the exiled sculptor who handed her a handwritten letter of introduction. “He told me, ‘You should go to Ai Weiwei. Would you like to work for him?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ And he wrote a letter. He told me, ‘Don’t call, don’t email, it’s complicated. Just go to Beijing, go to the studio, and hand him this letter.’”

So she did. Fresh out of school, with no job and no plan, Eleonora flew to Beijing and walked into Ai Weiwei’s studio. “He looked at it and said, ‘This is from one of my best friends. He’s my brother. We can try for three months.’ I stayed for four years.”

Image of the Stars Art Group. Source: royalacademy.org.uk

Those four years shaped her. “It was my first job,” she recalls. To her, the experience was like breathing freedom of expression every day. The studio was under constant surveillance. “The Chinese people who worked there were incredibly brave,” she said. “They were risking something real. For the foreigners, we were safe. But for them, it meant surveillance. It meant trouble.”

“It was my first job, and I developed my work experience in a place where I was breathing freedom of expression and freedom of speech every day.”

When Ai Weiwei finally left China for Berlin, Eleonora stayed. She worked for other artists and spent two more years immersed in China’s complex cultural landscape. But in 2018, she needed change. “I had this thought: after all this time in China, I don’t know anything about the U.S. I wanted to see what was happening.” Two weeks after arriving in New York, she attended a blockchain conference at the National Arts Club in Manhattan, where she met speakers such as SuperRare John, Judy Mam from Dada, Jessica Angel, and members of the Rare Pepe project. The Rare Pepe project, in particular, caught her attention and made her realize that curatorial work could give context and meaning to this new, emerging space.

After the conference, at a dinner, she asked, “Do you have any literature on this? Something we could bring to the art world and say, do you know this exists?” The founders hesitated. “They didn’t want curators. They didn’t want paper. They didn’t want anything. But someone smart enough said, ‘We can do a book.’” So they did.

The Rarest Book, 2018 by Eleonora Brizi. Source: wiki.pepe.wtf

That October, she launched The Rarest Book, a curatorial publication about Rare Pepes, first at the New Art Academy conference, then again the next day at Bushwick Generator. “All the New York community actually came,” she says. “That’s how I started. And that’s how I think I transitioned from Ai Weiwei to crypto art, because I found the same need and like screaming for freedom of expression… It was always with the rebels. And it was always with the socially involved art somehow, like social change. Either from like a dissident or crypto art, which is a way to be dissident, you know, that’s, I think, what always drew me.”

Renaissance 2.0 2.0: The Child of Its Own Time

In 2020, as the world braced for lockdown and Italy became the first European country to shutter its cities, Eleonora Brizi was preparing to launch one of the earliest in-person exhibitions dedicated to blockchain-based art. She called it Renaissance 2.0 2.0., a nod to the idea that this moment wasn’t a continuation of the Renaissance, but a reformatting of what “art” might mean altogether. The venue was unexpected: a historic gallery in the heart of Rome. “I found a man,” she says, laughing softly. “He was the owner of this amazing space in Rome, and he knew nothing about digital art. Nothing about blockchain. Nothing about what I was doing.”

But maybe that was the point. “He said to me, ‘I’m so bored of doing religious exhibitions. Of always showing the Renaissance, or just rehashing history. I want to do something different.’” When he asked her how much money she had, her answer was blunt: “Zero. I have zero. But I’m not a thief,” she added, “so if I need to get sponsors, I can try.”

Opening of the Renaissance 2.0 2.0 exhibition in 2018 in Rome, curated by Eleonora Brizi. Source: movemagazine.it

Instead of turning her away, he said yes. “I’ll give you the space for free,” he told her, “but promise me one thing, we make a printed catalog.” He ran a publishing company and liked the idea of anchoring the ephemeral into something tangible. “That’s why we have the Renaissance 2.0 2.0. catalog,” she explains. “It’s because of that agreement.” The show was meant to open in April 2020. Then came the first lockdown. The date was pushed to June, and that was still not possible. Eventually, it landed in October. “We called it the miracle show,” Eleonora says. “Because everything was working against us. COVID, logistics, travel, timing, my own health.”

“I was sick, in pain, completely overwhelmed. I had no assistant. I was doing everything alone.” But what made Renaissance 2.0 2.0. even more extraordinary was the fact that no one in Italy knew what crypto art was. “Nobody knew,” she says flatly. “In New York, it was small but growing. But in Italy? Nothing.” Still, she persisted. “Because I believed in the art. I believed in the artists.”

But then came more restrictions. “Every Monday, the government would issue new rules. First, they took away the cocktail from the opening. Then they took away the conference I had planned, panels on blockchain and art, with people flying in to speak. Gone. Then more rules: no gatherings in enclosed spaces. No mingling. No drinks. No nothing.”

And then, another blow. The artists, many of whom had planned to install their own work, backed out. Some had virtual sculptures. Others needed to be on-site to adjust digital equipment, test VR displays, manage installations. “But nobody came,” she says. They were scared. Or flights were cancelled. Or they just couldn’t risk it. So there she was: a single woman, surrounded by screens and cables and boxes of artwork, trying to pull together a show with no support, no event, no clear audience.

“Even without a cocktail, without music, without a conference... 550 people came. Five hundred and fifty people, in Rome, showed up just to see the art.”

The owner of the space came to her and asked: Do you want to postpone? Eleonora thought about it. And then, in her words: “I said, this show is the figlio, the child, of its own time. It was born of COVID. It carries that energy. We go ahead.” And then something extraordinary happened. “Even without a cocktail, without music, without a conference… 550 people came. Five hundred and fifty people, in Rome, showed up just to see the art. With masks, of course.

Hackatao’s work at the Renaissance 2.0 2.0 exhibition in 2020 in Rome, curated by Eleonora Brizi. Source: movemagazine.it

“That’s when I knew,” Eleonora says. The work mattered. People wanted to see something different. They didn’t come because they understood crypto. They came because they were thirsty. And yet, in the eyes of the art world, the show barely registered. She had no institution backing her. No collector press. No critic from Frieze or Flash Art writing it up. But for those who attended, Renaissance 2.0 2.0. was a vision of digital art in situ, in space, surrounded by the silence of a culture in shock. And for Eleonora, it marked a turning point in how she had to present herself.

In 2019, there was no such thing as a crypto art curator. The role didn’t exist. So she adapted. “I needed language that people could understand. So I said I had a gallery. A gallery of art and technology. That’s how I presented myself. Nobody would have understood if I said I was curating decentralized, token-based, digital-native work. But everyone understands ‘gallery owner.’” And yet, the irony lingered. She was curating work born of decentralization, of borderlessness, frictionlessness, and radical access. But the world she had to translate it into still ran on old expectations, old language, and old hierarchies. Even the crypto art world, for all its claims to openness, wasn’t immune.

Beyond the Western Node

For a space that claims to be decentralized, the crypto art world is strikingly narrow in its geography. “Europe and the U.S.,” Eleonora says. “And now, a little bit, the Middle East. But where are the artists?” By artists, she doesn’t mean the handful of non-Western names dropped into curatorial press releases to meet diversity quotas. She means creators, platforms, collectors. Entire ecosystems that remain untouched because the infrastructure we build is rarely designed to include them. “All these artists we’ve supported until now,” she continues, “are probably, I don’t know if you can say 90%, maybe even 95%, American or European.”

It’s not that she wants token diversity. In fact, she’s deeply skeptical of the “one-from-everywhere” model that tokenizes inclusion while leaving its structural problems intact. “I don’t like to force things,” she says. “I don’t like politically correct submissions where you need one person from here, one from there, one of this gender. I understand why we do it, but it’s been pushed too much.” For Eleonora, inclusion should be driven by genuine cultural curiosity. “We should genuinely be interested in different cultures. We should onboard them not because we need to appear diverse, but because it’s interesting. China is completely different.”

In 2023, she visited China again, her first time back in years, and was stunned by what she found. “I was shocked,” she says. “The technological possibilities, the availability of devices, the quality of the infrastructure, it’s another level.” Reflecting on the contrast, she adds, “We’re still using TVs, while they have entire circular rooms with huge wraparound screens. The sound is spatial, coming from every direction. The technology is outstanding — the installations are beautiful, the spaces are impressive.” She recalls visiting UCCA, where a Korean artist had transformed the space into massive tunnel-like structures built for biotech art. And at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing — located at the top of a mall — she encountered three major exhibitions: a Beeple retrospective; an immersive installation for children recreating scenes from ancient China with interactive screens and GPS-guided characters; and a flower-themed show featuring rare works by Kusama, Koons, and even Botero. “There’s still a lot to integrate—different systems, different cultural approaches—but it’s not about who’s better or worse. It’s just different. It would be wonderful if we could find ways to connect these worlds and exchange knowledge and access between them.”

Installation view of the exhibition Beeple: Tales From a Synthetic Future, 2024, at Deji Art Museum. Source: artreview.com

And yet, despite the resources, China remains absent from Web3-native conversations. Not because of disinterest, but because of barriers, legal, political, linguistic, and financial. “These barriers are very real,” Eleonora says. “But there are ways around them. Not illegal ways, just different pathways.” She references the Beeple show as an example. “All the works in that show were collected by a Chinese collector. The people are in mainland China. The art is there, for all the Chinese public to see. But nobody’s talking about NFTs or crypto, even though everyone knows who Beeple is. It’s digital. It’s Web3. The wallet, however, is based in Hong Kong, where the transactions are carried out legally.”

“…it’s not about who’s better or worse. It’s just different. It would be wonderful if we could find ways to connect these worlds and exchange knowledge and access between them.”

This, she suggests, might be the way forward: not trying to make China conform to Western models of crypto adoption, but understanding how parallel systems operate within constraint. “Maybe you don’t say, ‘Hey, we’re paying in crypto.’ Maybe you find another entry point. A legal structure. A payment solution. A gallery partner. Maybe that’s not ideal, but it’s better than pretending entire regions don’t exist.”

Building for the Future

For Eleonora, the limitations of Web3 art aren’t only geographical — they’re generational. The same structures that exclude new regions also fail to reach new audiences. ”We’re not talking to the new generation,” she says bluntly. “The collectors we keep begging to come into the space? They’re not young. They’re not the future.” This hits a nerve. Because for all its rhetoric about change, the crypto art world has increasingly sought validation not from new systems, but from old institutions.

“We still think approval has to come from Christie’s,” she says. “That’s what everyone still believes. And I’m so disappointed. I promise you, not many people are building for the next 20 years.” The focus on prestige has created what she calls a “confused space,” a community speaking in new language while still chasing old approval. “We want the old institutions to recognize us. But we’re not speaking to the young people who will actually stay. And we’re not making it easy for them.” Her critique is unsparing. “These wallets? This UX/UI? It’s incomprehensible. We think it’s user-friendly because we already know how it works. But go talk to someone new, even someone young but outside crypto, and they’re completely lost.”

The solution, she believes, is fundamental rethinking. “We need to speak a new language. Not just about the future, but for the future. And that means talking to people who aren’t crypto bros, who aren’t whales, who don’t care about institutions but care about art.” For Eleonora, the tragedy isn’t that these people aren’t here. It’s that they were here, and left. Or were never invited. Or didn’t understand the rules.

“I’m disappointed in how we consigned these artists,” she says. “The ones we helped build from the beginning. And now their biggest chance to make history is to be validated by institutions that never cared.” She pauses. “Why didn’t we build our own institutions?” She’s not just asking rhetorically. She’s asking as someone who helped build the space from the ground up, someone who curated when “curator of crypto art” wasn’t even a job title, who co-authored The Rarest Book, who gave Pepe culture its first formal historical framing, and who still finds herself watching the same story repeat: artists chasing institutional approval from the very world they tried to disrupt. “Sotheby’s and Christie’s?” she says. “The level is too low for me.” It’s a rare thing to hear someone say out loud in the crypto art space, where prestige still exerts a gravitational pull. But for Eleonora, the auction houses represent everything that went wrong. “I’m so disappointed,” she says, quietly. “You don’t even know. I’m so disappointed in how we consigned these artists to the same old systems. And now their biggest chance is to be validated by institutions that never cared.”

The salesroom at Sotheby's during the"Grails" sale, dedicated to digital artwork owned by Three Arrows Capital. Source: Sotheby's

“These artists even brought their own collectors to them,” she says. “They didn’t do anything for the space. Literally nothing.” Her anger is palpable, but it’s the kind that comes from care. “We helped build these artists,” she says. “We built them from zero. And now their biggest opportunity is to be consigned to the Whitney, or MoMA. And we all act like that’s a victory.” But then she asks the question that undoes the whole framework: “Do we have an alternative?”

Because maybe, she says, that’s the problem. We never finished building the house. We started something radical, a new model, a new medium, a new value system, but when the flood came, we ran back to the old institutions for shelter. “What does an alternative even mean?” she asks. “It doesn’t mean building a museum of crypto art. People already tried that. That’s not the answer. The question is: if this art is digital, and as you said, dynamic, how do we build something for that?”

“The question is: if this art is digital, and dynamic, how do we build something for that?”

She’s not convinced anyone is asking the question seriously. “All the platforms that were built? They’re dropping one by one. They don’t work. Why? Because it’s an old model. Backed by investors. Not really decentralized. Not really new. Just a replication of the same gallery logic, but digital.”

“We never built the alternative,” Eleonora says. “We didn’t build it because we didn’t talk about it. We didn’t gather around the question. We just built faster versions of the same machine.” But the old machine doesn’t work for this art. That’s her point. Digital art isn’t slow, isn’t static, isn’t built for archives and temperature-controlled rooms. “If the nature of the art is dynamic,” she asks, “how are we going to respond to that?” She doesn’t claim to have the answer. But she insists we have to start the conversation. “This is what we should be doing. Not just more drops. More hype. More Twitter threads.”

Her own relationship to collecting complicates the narrative even further. She’s not a collector. Not even casually. “I’m a little weird about collecting,” she says. “I don’t collect anything, really. I’m not attached. I don’t feel the need to own.” Even when she loves a work, champions it, curates it into visibility, she doesn’t feel compelled to keep it. “I push hard for people to collect when I believe something should be collected. But me? I don’t need to own it. I don’t even do that with objects. If someone gives me something, I’m happy, but I don’t attach.” If she had more money, she says, it would be different, but not in the way you’d expect. “I’d be a patron,” she says. “Not a collector. I’d support. I’d help artists financially, if I could. But not to accumulate. Just to make sure they’re okay.”

This detachment from possession is a way of keeping the focus on the art, and the ecosystem around it, rather than the objects it produces. “It’s a little crazy, right?” she laughs. “I’m the co-founder of 100 Collectors, but I’m more interested in helping others collect. I just want this art to be supported.” The irony is sharp, but not surprising. In crypto art, as in traditional art, many of the most influential figures don’t appear on collectors’ leaderboards. They don’t make headlines. They don’t throw millions around. They build the rooms. They hold the archives. They do the memory work.

The Unseen Builders

Web3’s foundation wasn’t built by institutions, but by individuals, many of them women. “It’s absolutely not true that there aren’t women at the foundation of this space,” Eleonora says. “Look at Dada. Judy and Beatriz. One of the most innovative experiments in crypto art, two women.” She names others: “Serena Tabacchi started curating early. Kate Vass Galerie was one of the first. When I curated the Pepe book in 2018, there were no other women doing that. No other curators.”

But still, the visibility remains low. Especially on the collector side. “Yes, women are here,” she says. “We’re founders. Builders. Curators. But not whales.” And when women do collect, they’re often hidden behind male aliases, male faces, male wallet names. “Fanny Lakoubay often mentions this,” Eleonora says. “There are women behind many male collectors. They collect as couples. They make joint decisions. But the man is the one who gets remembered.” Even in the simple act of extending an invitation, this is visible. “Fanny is always careful,” she says. “When we invite someone for dinner, we include the wife, because she is behind it. She’s collecting. She’s shaping the decisions. She just doesn’t get seen.”

“Yes, women are here. We’re founders. Builders. Curators. But not whales.”

The reasons for this imbalance, Eleonora explains, are complex. “It’s all connected — finances, family, time,” she says. “And it’s not only in crypto art, it also happens in the traditional art world, but it’s especially visible in our space.” At the beginning, most of the first collectors who shaped the taste of early crypto art came from the crypto world itself. “For example, there’s Kelly leValley,” she notes. “She’s an amazing Bitcoiner and investor. She’s very successful, a serious collector, and someone I would consider a rare example of a financially independent woman in this space. She invests in Web3 companies, she collects, and she’s completely independent. She got into Bitcoin at the right time.”  But such examples remain rare. “That world, the world of funds, exchanges, trading, it’s still very male. Maybe because it’s built on competition, risk, speed, things that were never made to include women,” she says. “You probably need a lot of testosterone for that.”

The imbalance, she suggests, isn’t just cultural; it’s structural. “Until recently, there weren’t many possibilities for women to become financially independent,” Eleonora says. “That’s why we also have fewer female artists. Many didn’t study art, or weren’t allowed to.”

Change, however, is happening — slowly but visibly. “It’s improving,” she says, “but we need more time. It’s not one single issue. It’s everything together — history, money, education, opportunity. But it’s shifting.”

The team of 100 Collectors: Eleonora Brizi, Fanny Lakoubay, and Pauline Foessel. Source: Eleonora Brizi

The Language of Defiance

Eleonora Brizi doesn’t speak the language of hype. She speaks the language of art history, of defiance, of cultural memory. And when she stepped into the world of crypto art, she didn’t bring investor logic or VC bravado, she brought something rarer: curatorial integrity.

“When you work with someone like Ai Weiwei,” she says, “you learn what it means to make art that stands up to power.” It also taught her how institutions can fail. As she documented Ai’s work and began building bridges between contemporary Chinese artists and European audiences, Brizi quickly saw how slow and risk-averse traditional art institutions could be. "I was always trying to translate between two worlds,” she explains, “and too often, I saw how Western institutions didn't know how to read what they were being shown.”

So when she discovered the Rare Pepe project, something clicked. “It was crude, irreverent, unfiltered. But it reminded me of China. Of resistance. Of art that wasn’t waiting to be approved.” From that point on, Brizi became one of the first women in the crypto space to approach NFTs not as a financial instrument, but as an emergent language of cultural and political significance. She began researching the history of Rare Pepes obsessively, curating not just with an eye for value, but with a commitment to context. “I understood that if we didn’t write this history down, it would be erased,” she says.

Brizi has since curated exhibitions across Lisbon, Milan, and Amsterdam, but she’s remained critical of how Web3 has begun to replicate the same institutional power structures it once aimed to replace. “We talk about decentralization,” she says, “but so many artists—especially women, still struggle to stay in the space. There’s no real infrastructure of care.” She sees collecting not just as an act of acquisition, but of memory. A collector is also a recorder. A curator of future knowledge. And she’s quick to challenge the notion that market value should define which artworks survive.

It’s why she remains suspicious of crypto art’s obsession with provenance as a proxy for value. Provenance is important, but it’s not everything. Some of the most culturally significant works have no clear trail. Sometimes, it’s the forgotten JPEG that tells the real story. In a space still dominated by male collectors and loud capital, Brizi’s presence is quiet but seismic. She connects, she teaches, she preserves, and she makes space for others to be seen.