Davos

Davos: Cows, Clouds, Carpets

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The greatest conceptual artist working today has made another masterpiece. Pimlico Wilde are pleased to present Cows, Clouds, Carpets to the market.

Year: 2025

Medium: Fog brought from the mid-Atlantic, two borrowed dairy cows (rotated weekly), three flying carpets (grounded by health and safety), sandwiches (triangular), and a ceiling painted to look like the floor.

Dimensions: Constantly shifting.

Davos’ “Cows, Clouds, Carpets” presents itself as a meditation on weight and levity, earth and sky, udder and ether. Visitors enter the gallery to discover two cows placidly grazing on a carpet of artificial turf. Above them, three ornate Persian flying carpets should hover. A wall text explains that owing to health and safety restrictions, the carpets have had to be placed on the ground, the visitor must imagine them in flight.

A little mid-Atlantic fog is gently released every 47 seconds, obscuring visibility and encouraging visitors to step gingerly, lest they mistake a cow for a carpet or vice versa. The ceiling has been painted with meticulous trompe-l’œil to resemble the gallery floor, leaving some viewers unsure whether they are standing on the ground at all.

A small tray of sandwiches, replenished daily, rests on a low plinth near the entrance. They are triangular, crustless, and entirely untouched. They are both offering and warning.

“When we are no longer sure what is beneath us, we may finally understand what it means to float.”

, Davos

The cows, borrowed (not hired, this is important) from a farm in Kent, provide a necessary grounding element: slow, heavy, deliberate presences that counterbalance the illusory weightlessness being imagined above.

The sandwiches play a less obvious but no less important role. The artist insists they are not for eating. They represent sustenance denied, a reminder that conceptual nourishment is rarely digestible. Their triangular form, Davos claims, echoes both pyramid and wedge: “Forms that aspire, but never quite arrive.”

The fog ensures the work is never seen in full clarity, suggesting that understanding is always partial and that cows, too, can be ethereal if conditions permit.

Visitor Guidelines:

• Do not attempt to ride the carpets, no matter how strong the temptation.

• The cows may look approachable. They are not.

• Please do not eat the sandwiches. Buyable sandwiches are available in the café.

• If you lose your sense of up and down, sit quietly until the fog clears.

Price: £1.4 million (including painted ceiling and contractual rights to temporarily borrow cows. NB: the fog is not included and will have to be sourced separately by the purchaser.

Limited Edition Artifact: A triangular sandwich cast in resin (edition of 25), available for £190,000 each.

Critics’ Reactions:

• The Welsh Art Magazine : “A sublime balance between bovine mass and mystical lift.”

• The Harewood Guardian: “I watched a cow stare at a carpet for ten minutes. Magica; I left convinced of art’s continuing power.”

With “Cows, Clouds, Carpets”, Davos offers a profound, solemn meditation on the tension between heaviness and flight, sustenance and illusion, cow and carpet.

“Cloud Ownership” by Davos Saved for the Nation — if the nation can raise £500,000

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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?

The Greatest Artist Alive: A Case for Davos

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By Dr. Eloise Stranter, FRSAE, PhD (Leominster), Professor of Contemporary Aesthetics, Leominster Institute of Art

In the canon of contemporary art, where boundaries have long been dissolved and reconstituted, where meaning is often decoupled from material, and where the act of making has been interrogated to the point of exhaustion, one artist stands not merely apart, but entirely elsewhere: Davos.

I do not make the claim lightly when I say that Davos is, in my considered view, the greatest artist living today. Not the most visible,but the most important. In an era awash with spectacle, Davos offers restraint; amid the frenzied production of objects, he gives us the radical act of conceptual austerity. His works are not merely dematerialised,they are never materialised at all. And in this, he stages the most searing and elegant critique of the art world since Duchamp quietly placed a urinal on a plinth.

The Sublime of the Unmade

Davos’s genius lies not in producing objects, but in the refusal to do so. His art exists in gallery labels, wall texts, and printed descriptions,lucid, sometimes poetic, sometimes deadpan accounts of works that will never be realised. These descriptions, however, are not ancillary to an absent object. To my mind, they are the object. The text is not a placeholder; it is the entirety.

One might be tempted to compare him to Lawrence Weiner, or to invoke the linguistic provocations of Joseph Kosuth. But Davos goes further: while conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s often gestured toward realizability, Davos abolishes the concept of execution altogether. The material, in his hands (or mind), is not only subordinate to the idea,it is surplus to requirement.

Take, for instance, the following:

Empires of Light, 2021

A suspended chandelier spanning two city blocks, composed of fibre-optic threads woven by blind artisans across a decade. Illuminated solely by bioluminescent algae.

To stand before this label is to encounter a double experience: the aesthetic sensation conjured by the description, and the philosophical dissonance induced by its absence. The viewer completes the work, not through interactive participation, but through imaginative construction.

The Return of the Thought Object

What distinguishes Davos from his contemporaries is not simply his rejection of fabrication, but his elevation of the mental image as the supreme aesthetic form. He rescues art from the tyranny of the visible and reinstates the primacy of the idea,not as a sketch for an eventual work, but as the final, sufficient thing.

To view a Davos exhibition is to attend a kind of secular liturgy, where the faithful are those willing to see without seeing. His labels conjure works of monumental scale and impossible materials: Porsches coated in liquid gold, entire islands reshaped to resemble extinct species, an orchestra playing underwater in a lake filled with ink. These are not pranks; they are sublime thought experiments.

The unmaking of the object becomes, paradoxically, the most audacious act of creation.

Critique Without Cynicism

One might assume Davos’s work is satirical, a wry jab at the art market’s insatiable appetite for spectacle and luxury. But his work is never cheapened by irony. There is wit, certainly, but also reverence,for the conceptual traditions of art, for the imaginative capacities of the viewer, and even, curiously, for the things he never builds.

He does not merely mock excess; he surpasses it by envisioning works so extravagant, so logistically untenable, that their very unfeasibility becomes part of their conceptual architecture. He once described a piece thus:

Monument to the Unbuildable, 2020

A rotating skyscraper made entirely of ice, to be erected in the Sahara and allowed to melt in silence.

There is quiet majesty here, not cynicism. His work is a love letter to art’s most unreachable ambitions.

A New Ontology of Art

In declaring Davos the greatest living artist, I am not merely offering a provocation. I am calling for a re-evaluation of what constitutes artistic greatness in our time. At very high prices Davos offers little product, little commodity, little spectacle. He offers instead a set of ideas so pure, so meticulously constructed, that they inhabit a space usually only reached by philosophy or elemental poetry.

His work is the antidote to a culture suffocating under the weight of its own visual clutter. In Davos, we find a rare thing: an artist who does not add to the noise, but instead reveals how deeply we can hear in silence.

‘This Is Not a Porsche’: The Conceptual Art of Davos

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Into a world increasingly obsessed with stuff emerges Davos, a conceptual artist who offers not sight, nor sound, nor spectacle, but suggestion. His work is not to be viewed but envisioned, not installed but intuited. Davos is the artist who never lifts a brush, welds no metal, sculpts no stone. Instead, he conjures entire exhibitions from nothing more than language.

Art by Proxy

Davos’s oeuvre,if such a word can be used for a collection of works that do not, strictly speaking, exist,consists entirely of wall labels and descriptive texts. A Davos exhibition is a quiet place. White walls, minimal lighting, and the elegant hum of the cognitive dissonance generated when one reads a label that says:

Untitled (Eternal Acceleration), 2023 and the description, Porsche 911 Carrera, chromed entirely in liquid gold, mounted vertically in a rotating, slow-motion corkscrew, simulating the trajectory of a pop star’s ambition.

This is the Davosian paradox: his art is not immaterial,it is vividly material, just not made. The viewer must provide the construction scaffolding, the engineering team, the liquified precious metals. You do all the heavy lifting in your mind. It’s art as intellectual fitness program.

The Invisible Cathedral

Critics have likened Davos’s work to that of Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, or Yoko Ono’s Instruction Pieces, but Davos goes further. Where LeWitt wrote instructions for art that could theoretically be made by anyone, Davos doesn’t even offer that luxury. His instructions are not blueprints; they are near impossibilities. He does not outsource production. He abolishes it.

Consider:

Monument to Forgetting, 2022

A life-size replica of the Eiffel Tower constructed entirely of recycled museum visitor passes, positioned in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Removed annually and rebuilt elsewhere to be forgotten again.

It’s logistical madness, poetic futility, and carbon-conscious conceptualism, all rolled into one desert mirage.

The Medium Is the Muse

Davos’s materials of choice,diamonds, liquified currency, radioactive isotopes, topiary arranged to mimic satellite imagery,are neither arbitrary nor fully ironic. They reflect contemporary art’s infatuation with spectacle, value, danger, and the monetisation of vision itself. But instead of making these grand, bank-breaking gestures, Davos dares to do what no luxury art fair can abide: he imagines them. And then dares you to pay him a lot of money to imagine them too.

There is a refreshing frankness to Davos’s own words:

“I realised that conceptual art doesn’t need to actually be made , the artist only has to describe it and it exists.”

Indeed. His Porsches are always pristine, his dunes perfectly raked by unseen hands. His diamonds never conflict-sourced, his scale always heroic. Nothing has ever gone over budget or collapsed during installation.

A Gallery of Ghosts

Walking through a Davos show is like leafing through the best exhibition catalogue you’ve ever read, minus the exhibition. His art is what haunts the white space between what is possible and what is plausible. One label reads:

Large String Orchestra, 2024

Fifty thousand violins suspended in mid-air by invisible wires, each playing a single note at sunrise, powered by the collective sighs of insomniacs.

Final Thought

To dismiss Davos as a prankster or a charlatan is to miss the point. His work is a meditation on art’s reliance on the act of belief. After all, is the Sistine Chapel ceiling any less impressive if you’ve only ever seen it in a textbook? Does one have to walk around The Gates in Central Park to know they flapped in the wind?

Davos reminds us that the art we carry in our heads is often more enduring,and more transportable,than anything mounted to a plinth. He is the idea in the absence, the artist who shows up only to remind us that sometimes, nothing is really something.

And it’s very expensive.

Title: “Please Do Not Interact With The Art (Except When You Must)”

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Year: 2025

Medium: A velvet rope (dangling), a sensor-activated alarm (too sensitive), 37 ambiguous objects (deliberately fragile), a security guard (overly involved).

Dimensions: Shifts depending on transgressions.

“Please Do Not Interact With The Art (Except When You Must)” is a rigorous examination of boundaries, authority, and the fine line between passive observation and inevitable catastrophe. The installation consists of 37 objects placed throughout the gallery space, their arrangements echoing both order and an accident waiting to happen. Each object teeters just slightly, as if placed in mild defiance of gravity.

A single velvet rope hangs in the middle of the room, unattached to anything, useless yet present.

An omnipresent sign warns: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE ARTWORK.

However, hidden motion sensors trigger a piercing alarm if a visitor steps too close,the definition of too close fluctuating wildly. Some experience the siren from metres away. Others only realize they’ve transgressed when a security guard appears, shaking their head in quiet disappointment.

Adding to the confusion, select objects are labeled: “PLEASE INTERACT.”

But these labels are written in faint, barely legible text and are placed facing the wall.

Visitors must decide: To interact, or not? To test the system, or submit to its unseen logic? The security guard watches. The alarm waits. The velvet rope sways ever so slightly in the artificial breeze.

“We accept authority without question until it contradicts itself. Then we are lost.”

, Davos

This work centres around institutional critique, performative obedience, and the aesthetics of control. With “Please Do Not Interact With The Art (Except When You Must)”, Davos weaponizes the fundamental rules of gallery etiquette, turning the act of looking into an act of risk.

The installation’s tension lies in its inconsistencies. The velvet rope,normally a symbol of separation,offers no clear division. The alarm enforces an invisible yet arbitrary boundary. The security guard, rather than preventing infractions, appears only after they occur, his silent reproach more unsettling than any verbal warning.

And then, of course, there are the 37 objects themselves. Are they art? Are they props? Are they traps? No one knows for sure. The only certainty is that, at some point, someone will set off the alarm.

Visitor Guidelines:

• Do not touch the artwork. (Unless you must.)

• The security guard cannot answer your questions. He is part of the piece.

• If you hear the alarm, assume it was your fault.

• If you do not hear the alarm, assume you have missed the point.

Price: £785,000 (includes objects, alarm system, and an ongoing agreement with the security guard).

Limited Edition Artifact: A signed PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH sign (edition of 14), available for £120,000 each.

Critics’ Reactions:

•“A brutal interrogation of institutional control. I have never been so afraid of an alarm.”

• “Davos forces us to question the nature of permission. I was reprimanded three times, and I deserved it.”

• “I did not touch the art. And yet, I still feel guilty.”

With “Please Do Not Interact With The Art (Except When You Must)”, Davos invites us into a paradox: a space where we are simultaneously free and restricted, where we follow the rules until we realize,too late,that we’ve already broken them.

Please Stop Naming Things

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Five untitled objects (various materials), laminated labels (blank), an interactive naming station (non-functional), and a recorded apology.

Please Stop Naming Things is an urgent plea against categorisation, a direct confrontation with language’s futile attempt to impose order onto the unordered. The installation consists of five completely unidentifiable objects, each placed on its own pristine white plinth. They resist classification. They are not sculptures, nor are they functional. They are simply there, refusing to confirm or deny their own purpose.

Each plinth features a laminated museum-style label beneath it. The labels are blank.

At the far end of the gallery, visitors encounter what appears to be an interactive station labeled Name this Object. It consists of a touchscreen and a keyboard, inviting participants to define what cannot be defined. However, the touchscreen does not respond. The keyboard is not plugged in. The act of naming has been made impossible.

A soft voice plays over hidden speakers every six minutes. It simply says, “We’re sorry, but that name is already taken.”

“A thing does not need a name to exist. It does not need a category to matter. A chair is only a chair because someone pointed at it and said so. What if we stopped pointing?”

, Davos

This work operates in the liminal space between language and objecthood. Taking cues from minimalist sculpture, conceptual negation, and the failures of taxonomy, Please Stop Naming Things refuses to participate in the viewer’s desperate need for identification.

The five objects,made of unspecified materials,offer no clues to their origins or intended use. Are they industrial remnants? Sculptural gestures? Forgotten tools? Each visitor arrives with their own assumptions, only to be confronted with a complete lack of confirmation. The interactive naming station, a cruel mirage of participation, heightens the frustration. The recorded apology, played at irregular intervals, taunts those who attempt to impose meaning.

It is unclear whether the apology is sincere.

• The touchscreen is non-functional. No amount of pressing will change this.

• If you feel an overwhelming urge to classify what you see, please sit with that feeling until it passes.

Price: £540,000 (includes all five objects, blank labels, and a certificate that simply states “It Exists.”)

The Last Frame is Yours

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Medium: 127-hour single-channel video, involuntary audience participation, signed NDAs, mandatory reflective silence.

Screening Format: 16K digital projection, no subtitles.

Runtime: 5 days, 7 hours, 12 minutes. No intermissions.

The Last Frame is Yours is not a film. It is a commitment, a test, a sentence. At 127 hours in length, the piece obliterates the notion of passive spectatorship, demanding total submission from its audience. Gallery-goers must sign a waiver before entering, acknowledging their understanding that no one is permitted to leave until the final frame has been seen.

The film’s structure is elusive: a meandering collage of unedited security footage, flickering landscapes filmed at one frame per hour, actors reading novels in languages they don’t understand with deliberate hesitation, and entire stretches of black screen where the only soundtrack is the lo-res recording of a someone filling a car with petrol. At irregular intervals, a clock appears, but it does not tell the time.

Viewers are provided with a single, numbered blanket and a deliberately uncomfortable chair. Meals are served in near silence, consisting of a thin broth and dry crackers, a menu devised in collaboration with sleep deprivation researchers. At night (though time loses meaning quickly), pre-recorded voices murmur speculative reflections on the nature of endings, though it is never clear who is speaking.

Davos insists the audience must earn the final frame. Only those who endure the full experience are granted the right to see it. What happens in the last moment remains unknown,viewers sign an NDA and are forbidden from discussing it outside the screening.

Artist Statement:

“This work is a short film that I have worked on whilst researching my magnum opus, a 300 hour feature filmed on Hampstead Heath called Fred Astaire goes to Space.”

, Davos

Curator’s Notes:

This work is the culmination of a career-long investigation into the intersection of time, endurance, and the collapse of voluntary engagement. With The Last Frame is Yours, he transcends conventional filmic expectations, creating a piece that is at once cinematic, sculptural, and carceral.

Drawing from the durational legacies of Warhol’s Empire and Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, but stripping away the safety of optional departure, Davos forces the viewer into a state of radical submission. The fluctuating pace,sometimes glacial, sometimes violently abrupt,mirrors the psychological erosion of captivity, though unlike most imprisonment, this is one the audience has chosen.

The final frame, withheld until total surrender, serves as both punishment and reward. Those who reach it emerge transformed, though no one can say exactly how.

Visitor Guidelines:

• Once admitted, attendees may not leave until the screening is complete.

• Bathroom breaks are allowed, but must be taken in silent, single-file procession, monitored by a gallery attendant.

• No external timekeeping devices are permitted. Phones must be left outside.

• At the end of the screening, attendees are required to sit in silent reflection for one hour before departure.

Price: £1,750,000 (includes blanket, numbered certificate of completion, and exclusive access to a single still from the final frame).

Limited Edition Prints: A series of five images from indeterminate points in the film, titled You Were Here, But When?, is available for £250,000 each.

Critics’ Reactions:

• Sally Quant: “A relentless, unforgiving masterpiece.”

• Michel Downton: “Davos has done what no filmmaker has dared: he has made time itself the antagonist.”

• The Torquay Guardian: “I lasted 84 hours before I broke and was carried to A and E on a passing window-cleaner’s ladder. I can never know what I missed. This will haunt me forever.”

The Last Frame is Yours is not a film you watch. It is a film you survive.