In a quietly astonishing moment for British conceptual art, the work Cloud Ownership (2024) by Davos has been officially placed under an export bar, preventing its removal from the United Kingdom. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media, Singing and Sport has deemed the piece of “outstanding national importance,” citing its “singular contribution to the evolving relationship between art, property, and the ephemeral.”
Now, a consortium of public galleries is racing to raise the £500,000 required to keep it in the country. There is, however, no cloud in a crate, no installation to unbox. What they are trying to save, quite literally, is an idea.
A Monument to the Immaterial
Cloud Ownership was first “exhibited” in 2024 as part of Davos’ touring retrospective, Davos: Touring Retrospective. Visitors to the exhibition were issued a printed certificate, each entitling them to ownership of a cumulus cloud, tracked by satellite and renamed in their honour.
The terms of ownership were strict: the cloud could not be visited, photographed, influenced, or interacted with in any physical way. As Davos put it, “The cloud is yours precisely because it remains untouched by you. To own it is to let it pass.”
It is at once art that is absurd and profound. At a time when everything from tweets to rainforests is being commodified, Davos offered a piece of sky—unbuyable, unfixable, unpossessable—and asked whether ownership could be defined not by control but by consent.
Not for Sale Abroad
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art (RCEWA) issued the export bar last week following a private collector’s attempt to acquire the conceptual certificate and relocate it to a private archive in Geneva. Although the work has no physical form, the committee judged that its certificate—and the national context of its issuance—comprised an artwork of “distinctly British character and international conceptual significance.”
“This is not just a paper certificate,” said Dr. Lucinda Morley, chair of the committee. “It is a contract with the imagination, and a quietly radical gesture of stewardship. The idea that such a work might vanish into a vault, out of public mental reach, is antithetical to its meaning.”
The Race to Fund the Intangible
Now, galleries including The Ross on Wye Centre for Contemporary Art, the Blackchapel Gallery, and The Fruitmarket in Aberystwyth have launched a joint campaign to raise the estimated £500,000 needed to retain Cloud Ownership within the UK. The cost includes the certificate itself, artist’s rights, conceptual framework licensing, and an ongoing symbolic “tracking fee” for cloud-based satellite data—though, in typical Davos fashion, no actual satellites will be used.
“Some will scoff,” admits Caroline Dreyfus, director of acquisitions at the Blackchapel, “but this isn’t about buying weather. It’s about protecting one of the most quietly brilliant interrogations of value and authorship seen this decade.”
Already, philanthropic interest is high. There are rumours of cloud-owners—including poets, physicists, and at least one former Chancellor—pledging to help. Public support, however, has been more divided. One online commenter quipped: “Can’t we just print another certificate and call it ours?”—a question that goes to the very heart of the work.
Davos Responds
The artist himself—who rarely gives interviews—released a brief, handwritten statement through Pimlico Wilde gallery:
“Ownership is a form of attention. If the nation truly sees the cloud, then it is already here.”
A Precedent of Air
Whether the £500,000 target will be met remains to be seen. But Cloud Ownership continues to raise urgent and intriguing questions: What does it mean to “own” something we cannot grasp? Can an artwork be as much an agreement as an object? And can the state, with its customs forms and export bans, meaningfully legislate the invisible?
