Going Places: The College Art Students Who Fooled a Nation

Summary

Chameleon Podcast: "Going Places: The College Art Students Who Fooled a Nation"

Host: Josh Dean (Audiochuck | Campside Media)
Date: July 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Chameleon explores the fascinating true story of “Going Places”—a conceptual art stunt pulled off by a collective known as Leeds 13 in the late 1990s. Posing as if they'd used public funds to take a luxury holiday to Spain (and declaring it as “art”), these art students manufactured evidence to trick the British tabloid press—and the nation. What began as a critique of media gullibility and art world conventions erupted into a viral moment, sparking debates about art, truth, class, and the very nature of reality and journalism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Sarah Thornton and Leeds 13

• Sarah Thornton—not widely known in the art world, but a key player in the Leeds 13 collective—shares her artistic philosophy and history.
  • On her art: “I do a lot of nature and birds and things. Like, I don't do people because, you know, they could judge me... and the birds don't mind.” (01:21)
  • Her work aims to “give people an uplift in dark times.” (01:33)
  • Recurring motif: the disco ball—symbolizing collective joy and unity through music and dance (01:59).

2. The Birth of "Going Places": A Radical Art School

• Background on Leeds and its unique art department:
  • Radical, critical, collective—steeped in social history, feminism, postcolonial thinking.
    • Griselda Pollock (art historian): “You can’t understand how to make art if you don’t understand how people have made it before... every time an artist is in the studio, you have to say, I've got this stuff here and at the end of the day I may still just have stuff or I may have got something and people say, oh yeah, that's interesting. That's the key thing, transformation.” (10:14)
  • Leeds 13: Originally 13 students coming together around deep, critical conversation and group work (12:53).

Key Quote

• Sarah Thornton: “Without all those cogs, there would be no clock.” (12:53)

3. The Avant-Garde Gambit: Art History and the Tourist Gaze

• Influence of tutors: Exposure to concepts like reference, deference and difference—how artists stake a place in the avant-garde by both showing knowledge of the past and pushing forward.
  • Griselda Pollock: “If you want to be part of the kind of community called the avant garde... you have to make a work that references that, shows you know, shows deference, recognize the lineage, and then you have to make your play—which is difference.” (13:41)
• The students set out to critique contemporary tourism: their “holiday” would play with the “tourist gaze." (15:05)

4. Media Manipulation as Art: Faking the Vacation

• The plan: Pretend to use grant money for a drunken Spanish holiday, provide fake “evidence,” and lure the press into a manufactured scandal.
  • Sarah Thornton: “It was sort of like we wanted to manipulate the press. It wasn’t about some sort of starry eyed silliness.” (17:35)
• Elaborate steps to fake the trip:
  • Avoiding detection in Leeds (balaclavas, safe houses) (18:24)
  • Forgery of postcards, Spanish postmarks, staged poolside photos in Yorkshire, applied photo filters, sunbed tanning, coastal shots to pass as Spain (18:42–20:34)
  • Cooperation with Leeds airport staff to stage the “arrival”—adding a fake flight to the board (21:58)
• Press takes the bait, newspapers rage about “students on taxpayer-funded holidays.”
  • “The Leeds 13 were creating something that looked plausible at a glance, but also something that would fall apart the moment anyone did even a little work.” (21:31)

Memorable Moment

• “Cars full of journalists came from London up to outside the house...like, praying at the door. We were like under siege from it.” – Sarah Thornton (26:52)

5. The Reveal and Its Fallout

• The twist: On air, the students out themselves—the trip was a hoax, and the media had fallen for it.
  • “It went absolutely unbelievably crazy... it must have been a dry old day for news when that story broke, because it properly traveled.” – Sarah Thornton (27:52, 27:39)
  • The story spreads internationally.
• Vindication: Their project exposes the press's willingness to believe and amplify stereotypes about students and artists, all for a good scandal (28:13)

Key Quote

• Sarah Thornton: “They took the story without thinking... They wanted to run with the negative side of it without actually checking it out. That was what was expected in some ways. So I think we felt vindicated.” (28:13)

6. Critical and Public Reaction

• Debate in art and media circles over whether it was “real” art.
• Students appear on “Have I Got News for You” and other outlets.
• Community reaction overwhelmingly positive: “There was a lot of love for the project.” (30:27)
• Class critique: “They raised a finger to the whole establishment and to this aura around art. It's pompous, it's classy, it's elite, it's esoteric. ...It was very real and it made people think and it made them giggle.” – Griselda Pollock & Sarah Thornton (30:41–31:08)

7. The Institutional Response & The Next Show

• For their final degree show, Leeds 13 mount another provocation: they borrow famous and local art (Jeff Koons, Henry Moore, Duchamp) instead of showing their own work.
  • “They defined it by saying, okay, we will put on for our degree show nothing that we have made.” – Griselda Pollock (35:29)
  • University forced to evaluate if a collaborative conceptual gesture could receive collective honors—all members awarded the highest grade (37:31–37:35)
    • Griselda Pollock: “You either pass us all or you fail us all. Could it give people a degree for a collective operation? And in a sense a performance that has no object?” (37:31)

8. Legacy—Then & Now

• Leeds 13's members move on, remain connected, and “Going Places” is still remembered and discussed in art circles decades later.
  • “It's this beautiful jewel of experience in time that I felt like I made a difference.” – Sarah Thornton (38:05)
  • The project, in retrospect, resonates in today’s climate of “fake news”—Thornton wonders about their legacy, with a tinge of worry and pride (32:38).
  • The disco ball returns as a metaphor for the experiment: “Each little square of the mirror ball, once subjected to light, throws other lights... It keeps turning...” (40:50)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “I don't do people because, you know, they could judge me ... and the birds don't mind.” – Sarah Thornton (01:21)
• “There isn't something you have to say, this is art. It's in flux, it's nothing new. A surrealist situationist gada, the old Marcel Duchamp.” – Sarah Thornton (04:08)
• “It was sort of like we wanted to manipulate the press. It wasn’t about some sort of starry eyed silliness.” – Sarah Thornton (17:35)
• “They took the story without thinking, right, well, we might look into this a bit further or get in touch with the airport. They wanted to run with the negative side of it without actually checking it out.” – Sarah Thornton (28:13)
• “They raised a finger to the whole establishment and to this aura around art.” – Griselda Pollock (30:41)
• "How could you do something not to top it? ...What we did realise is that we were in a unique position because we were suddenly known." – Sarah Thornton (33:29)
• “You either pass us all or you fail us all. Could it give people a degree for a collective operation? ...The leads 13 played that back and said, okay, you've said to us, art is what it incites you to have to think about. And we are a collective.” – Griselda Pollock (37:31)
• “Each little square of the mirror ball, once subjected to light, throws other lights onto a surface that go from being a square to a circle and then disappear. But it keeps turning...” – Sarah Thornton (40:50)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Sarah Thornton Intro & Art Philosophy: 01:09–02:33
• Leeds Art School Context & Formation of Leeds 13: 07:41–13:09
• Theory of Avant-Garde Gambit & Tourist Gaze: 13:41–16:02
• Britain's Tabloid Culture & Diana’s Death as Context: 16:19–17:18
• The Hoax—Planning & Execution: 17:35–22:34
• Press Storm & Reveal: 26:01–27:57
• Public, Media, and Art World Reactions: 28:08–33:29
• The Next Project; Degree Show & Institutional Test: 33:29–37:35
• Legacy, Reflections & Enduring Impact: 38:05–41:27

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Conclusion

Going Places was more than an audacious prank—it was a layered critique of the media, society’s assumptions about art and artists, and the structures of collective action versus individual achievement. The Leeds 13’s work demonstrated how easily narratives can be constructed and manipulated, foreshadowing today’s anxieties about truth and information. Ultimately, their story continues to spark conversations about art, authenticity, and who gets to decide what's real.

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Transcript

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[Josh Dean]

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[Podcast Promos (various hosts: Ashley Flowers, Yvette Gentile & Racha Pecorero, Kylie Lowe)]

Campsite Media

[Griselda Pollock]

hello.

[Sarah Thornton]

What is.

[Josh Dean]

What do you want me to say?

[Podcast Promos (various hosts: Ashley Flowers, Yvette Gentile & Racha Pecorero, Kylie Lowe)]

It's just chameleon.

[Josh Dean]

Chameleon, Chameleon Weekly Sarah Thornton is an artist.

[Sarah Thornton]

I do a lot of nature and birds and things. Like, I don't do people because, you know, they could judge me and say, I don't like that fucking beak or whatever, you know, and the birds don't mind. They say nothing, you know.

[Josh Dean]

Sarah doesn't stick to one medium or subject, but she describes a sort of unifying quality to her work. She says she wants to make art that gives people an uplift in dark times. When we spoke, Sarah was wearing a T shirt with one of her own images on it.

[Sarah Thornton]

Yes, I know. How terrible of me to have put it on.

[Josh Dean]

It's of a disco ball, a recurring motif in her work that represents a lot for her.

[Sarah Thornton]

I sort of grew up going to Aldea's back in the 80s from a very early age, before the rave days, black music, house music, that was our scene. I really believe that dancing and listening to music as a collective experience is really unifying and gives us reasons to breathe.

[Josh Dean]

In many respects, Sarah's all in when it comes to her work. You can tell that just by hearing her talk.

[Sarah Thornton]

I felt like, well, you know, you can't leave this behind. This is who you are. I've always, since I could hold a crayon, I've been an artist.

[Josh Dean]

She's not famous or necessarily even known widely in the art world. And yet in the late 1990s, she was a key player in an art moment that has gone down in history. Something with escape velocity beyond the Galleries which got a whole country talking. It all started with a show put on by a group of art students in the north of England. It was called Going Places.

[Sarah Thornton]

You're basically turning up at an exhibition space thinking you're going to go to an exhibition. You don't know what's going on really. You have a young woman dressed as an heir to her dad welcomes you into the space. To start with this sangreal, there's music playing.

[Josh Dean]

The air stewardess then ushered the baffled guests out of the space and onto a waiting bus.

[Sarah Thornton]

You don't know where you're going. I think it did say Leeds Airport on the front. You turn up at the airport, you're waiting in the waiting lounge and for all you know, you don't know what's happening. And then the doors open.

[Josh Dean]

Sarah and her fellow students then emerged through the arrival gates.

[Sarah Thornton]

Pastanets and fans and silly hats and other people on the flight. My parents and best friends, parents, we come out to a sort of slightly bewildered looking audience. We then all go to the bar and have another few drinks and yeah, it becomes apparent that we're talking about gone on holiday for a week to posh a bit of Malago. And that holiday itself is art.

[Josh Dean]

Going on holiday to Spain as art

[Sarah Thornton]

because it's fine art, students doing it and we've said it's art, it's art in the tradition of conceptual art. There isn't a model, there isn't something that you have to say. This is art. It's in flux, it's nothing new. A surrealist situationist gada, the old Marcel Duchamp. It's part of a long line of different things.

[Josh Dean]

This project fed into every negative stereotype about students and for that matter, artists. Lazy, out of touch, pretentious. It seemed like they were, as the Brits would say, taking the piss. Very quickly, the story of these students who'd gone on vacation and declared it art was picked up by the press, first in the local LEED student newspaper. Con artists, Spanish Ripoff Art Grant Funds, Holiday in the Sun. Then three days later in the Yorkshire Evening Post, a broad canvas for free holiday art students. By the middle of the next week the story had reached the national tabloids. The Daily Mail went with, is this really high art or simply a student trip to the Costas at our expense? The Daily Sport went with brevity piss artists. But the finger wagging newspaper journalists of the United Kingdom should have paid a little more attention to what they were reporting on because there was a lot more to this artwork than they realized. If you ask art historian Griselda Pollock, what they were looking at was the

[Griselda Pollock]

most radical piece of conceptual art for their generation.

[Josh Dean]

Sarah and her collaborators had set a trap.

[Sarah Thornton]

It's art, but obviously it had its twist. And the twist is where the zest of the experience became something else altogether.

[Josh Dean]

I'm Josh Dean and this is Chameleon, the show where things are rarely how they first seem. This week, a group of art students from the north of England go 1990s viral by taking a vacation. But the trip is just a base

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[Podcast Promos (various hosts: Ashley Flowers, Yvette Gentile & Racha Pecorero, Kylie Lowe)]

Sometimes in the quiet corners of our world, or even in the glaring light of day, events unfold that defy the very fabric of reason. There is no scientific, logical, or readily apparent explanation for what we witness. It challenges our understanding, our beliefs, and even our sanity. Why do these things happen? What forces are at play? I'm Yvette Gentile. And I'm her sister, Racha Pecorero. Every week on our podcast so Supernatural, we dive deep into some of the earth's most bizarre and inexplicable occurrences. We don't just observe them, we actively try to explain the unexplainable. So if you're ready to have your perceptions challenged and your curiosity ignited, listen to so Supernatural every Friday. Wherever you get your podcasts,

[Josh Dean]

You're listening to Chameleon, the weekly if you spend a lot of time in the UK but can't quite place her accent, Sarah Thornton is from Leeds, the northern English city where our saga takes place.

[Sarah Thornton]

It's not Manchester, it's Leeds. Very different identity, strong strident personalities, forthright, opinionated, and not afraid to say who we are.

[Josh Dean]

Leeds is a historic industrial city originally known as a center for textiles and railways.

[Sarah Thornton]

Back in the 90s it was still pretty dilapidated, but we've always had a really strong music scene and club scene. Very underground. I think art was quite underground as well, really. It's like, you know, Yorkshire folk don't like to spend their money on something as daft as art.

[Josh Dean]

Originally from Chapeltown, a working class immigrant area, her parents moved to the posture end of the city when she was

[Sarah Thornton]

young, I felt Like I'd landed on another planet because it had these incredible modern buildings as well as really beautiful historic ones like the Brotherton Library. Well worth a Google. My 12 year old self would wander around the university campus at all times.

[Josh Dean]

Becoming a university student just wasn't one of Sarah's expectations. And after high school she got a full time job, but she loved art and she loved learning. She did evening classes, worked her way towards an art theory qualification and then a year of art school where she got to do what she was most interested in actually make art. By this point, Sarah was 10 years older than most of the people in her course. Then, with the qualifications in the bank, she applied to the prestigious art course at Leeds and got in. Based at the same campus, she had walked around in wonder as a child,

[Griselda Pollock]

we were providing a kind of intellectual, political, cultural framing for art practice, which was unique.

[Josh Dean]

This is Griselda Pollock, who taught fine art and history of art at Leeds from 1977 to 2021. It was unusual for a top university to teach art practice, but this was only part of what made the Leeds course different.

[Griselda Pollock]

You teach art history, which is academics telling you about art and you have the studio where people make art, right? But the radical thing about Leeds was you can't understand how to make art if you don't understand how people have made it before. But that's not a technical question because that's also got to understand why did they make that art?

[Josh Dean]

Then the students were pushed to consider how they, as artists and as people, fit into the world in which they were making things. It included ideas from social history, cultural studies, feminism, post colonialism.

[Griselda Pollock]

When art historians teach modern art, saying there was Impressionism, then there was Cubism, then there was Surrealism and then there was this. They don't get it. Every time an artist is in the studio, you have to say, I've got this stuff here and at the end of the day I may still just have stuff or I may have got something and people say, oh yeah, that's interesting. That's the key thing, transformation. And it's not intellectual transformation, it's this thing that we call creativity, that thing we call art.

[Josh Dean]

The lead's approach was radical at the time, probably still is.

[Griselda Pollock]

I chose to teach in Leeds because I couldn't stand art historians. I can't stand the way they present art. I hate television art history. We were just seen as this hotbed of radicals and revolutionaries.

[Josh Dean]

Griselda and other notable artists and educators such as Terry Atkinson and Fred Orton pushed each other and Their students to question everything, to push the limits of what art was. Sarah loved everything about was a department

[Sarah Thornton]

full of minds, active minds, and just coming in as new young people. It's like you're questioning everything you do. You're looking at it under a critical lens. And sometimes that lens is setting fire to things. It's setting fire to your ideas. And I felt like I met my people and I met my tribe.

[Josh Dean]

Sarah had one of those experiences you have maybe once or twice in your life, if you're lucky, where you find yourself part of a group that instantly clicks with people who can make you feel a little more like yourself than you ever have before.

[Sarah Thornton]

It just felt like we were having a collective experience of learning, yes, as individuals, but our strengths seemed to be in the conversations. So I think that is how working together came about.

[Josh Dean]

She was older than all the others, and this gave Sarah the confidence to take the lead in bringing people together.

[Sarah Thornton]

It was mostly girls. I kind of felt like the girls didn't get to say what they maybe were feeling. It was a lot of youth and shyness, and I feel like. I don't know, I wanted to get people involved, you know, get everybody to have a voice.

[Josh Dean]

These conversations led to the group formally working together. Sarah's group is what eventually became the collective known as Leads 13. Because, yes, there were 13 of them.

[Sarah Thornton]

There will always be personalities that have got a bigger garb or, you know, will quietly squirrel away with the admin side of things. But without all those cogs, there would be no clock. There would be no time.

[Josh Dean]

At the end of the year, the students had to come up with an idea for their final showcase.

[Sarah Thornton]

Oh, it could be this or it could be, you know, like an exploding balloon, or. Not that. That's anything that we said. But somehow or another one voice or a few voices came out with a word. A holiday. It could be a holiday. It could be. And it just sort of erupted out of that.

[Josh Dean]

The idea they eventually settled on was in part influenced by Griselda, one of their tutors. She remembers giving a lecture titled the Avant Garde Gambit about the artists Van Gogh and Gauguin.

[Griselda Pollock]

If you want to be part of the kind of community called the avant garde, you have to understand what that play was. That's the gambit. You have to make a work that references that shows that you know, that that's called reference. And then you have to show deference, that you also recognize there's a lineage. And then you have to make your play, which is called difference. So it was Reference, deference and difference.

[Josh Dean]

In 1891, Paul Gauguin left Paris for Polynesia. There he painted the now famous series depicting Tahitian life, including nudes. He shipped his paintings back to France. And when critics saw the images, which are problematic for a number of reasons, they immediately clocked the obvious link to a scandalous nude from a generation earlier, Manet's Olympia. That's the reference and the deference. Gauguin's difference wasn't just that the bodies in his paintings were different from Manet's. It was the gaze, the way Tahiti and its people were seen by outsiders and the way those images were meant to be looked at back in Europe. The tourists gaze. They're paintings that can only be fully understood if you know the colonial context of the time. Back in 1990s Britain, the Leeds 13 were about to pull off their own avant garde gambit.

[Griselda Pollock]

Everybody who goes off to Spain in the 1990s, which is the big thing, was to go on holiday in those sorts of places are bearers of this tourist gaze. Cause they come back and they don't know about Spain, they're not interested in Spain. It's just exoticism. It's, you know, all this drunkenness and you go to these horrible resorts and you destroy them, but you've seen nothing. You have no relationship to the place. My view is that their choice to go to Spain and come back with, you know, donkeys and umbrellas and invite everybody to Sangria and all the rest of it was connecting with that critique of the contemporary tourism through this, you know, art historical sort of foundations of it, which links with two of the great sort of canonical figures, if you were studying modern art.

[Josh Dean]

Showing they understood the reference was only the first step. They had to make their move, show a difference for the likes of Griselda to consider it avant garde. And their idea came from something that would have made absolutely no sense in 1890s France. We have reports from Paris that Diana,

[Sarah Thornton]

Princess of Wales, has been killed in

[Josh Dean]

a car accident and that her partner, Dodi Fayed, has also been killed. They were apparently being pursued by paparazzi on two motorcycles.

[Sarah Thornton]

I'm not a royalist, but, you know, there was a massive public outpouring over that and there was a lot of anger at how the press had hounded her, which they did undeniably hound that woman.

[Josh Dean]

Britain in the late 1990s was the golden age of the tabloids. Their hounding of the people's Princess in the run up to her death was the straw that broke the camel's back and turned the public against them. It seemed tabloid journalists would go to any length to get a story, to use a simplified narrative to whip the masses into a frenzy. Celebrities, but also politics. The press had real power to shape and destroy people.

[Sarah Thornton]

The right wing press, I'm going to say that, make a point of that because it's still the same. They're manipulating the masses for their own means. And that was very, very, very visible in that day.

[Josh Dean]

To put their idea simply, the students known as the Leeds 13 decided they were going to manufacture a story and feed it to the press on a plate. And in doing so, they would expose the machine behind journalism. How it fed on prejudice about class, about art, about students, I can't say

[Sarah Thornton]

really enough times in capital letters fundamental to where we were coming from. It was sort of like we wanted to manipulate the press. It wasn't about some sort of starry eyed silliness.

[Josh Dean]

The real art was the media's reaction because the students hadn't gone on holiday at all. They'd faked the whole thing. For their plan to work, the Leeds 13 students needed people to believe they'd actually all gone to Spain and that meant hiding for a week. Leeds was a tight knit, essentially walkable place. Everyone bumped into everyone all the time. So this was no easy task.

[Sarah Thornton]

We weren't going to lectures, we weren't having appointments with personal tutors. We disappeared off the face of the earth really.

[Josh Dean]

They had to fly below the radar.

[Sarah Thornton]

I went out in balaclavas occasionally or dressed up in disguises. It was silly, you know. That was fun. That was that cloak and dagger which added to the excitement of it, I think.

[Josh Dean]

Stowed away in a couple of safe houses, the students set about manufacturing evidence to make it safe. Seem like they'd actually been away.

[Sarah Thornton]

Very lucky to have a beautifully skilled Jen Larkin on board who did the forgery of the postcard. It was immaculate.

[Josh Dean]

They had the fake postcard delivered, Spanish postmark and all, to their tutors.

[Sarah Thornton]

And I love that that had to be sneaked into the university to go on a postal trolley that had move around and eventually go to the department.

[Josh Dean]

And then there were the photographs. This was long before most people ever imagined AI that could create believable images out of thin air. Photographs held tremendous weight as evidence back then because they were very hard to fake.

[Sarah Thornton]

I'd found a place in Chapel Allerton that I knew had an outdoor pool and I'd always thought, oh God, look at them, they've got an outdoor pool. And I managed to get in touch with the people that rented out the flats and asked if we could go and use their pool.

[Josh Dean]

The student posed as sun and booze drenched vacationers cavorting and lounging on sunbeds and then applied filters to the images to make them look more authentic. It's kind of brilliant. These photographs really do look like they were taken on the Casa del Sol. Unless, you know, it's Yorkshire.

[Sarah Thornton]

I mean, it was icy. I think it was Aprilish when we were jumping into that pool.

[Josh Dean]

One of my favorite details is that when the students walked back through arrivals, they were all sporting deep, rich tans. I kept wondering how they pulled that off. But this was the 1990s. That might have actually been the easiest part of the whole operation.

[Sarah Thornton]

There was a million and one places to hire a sunbed from, and they just deliver it for you and you just cook yourself in the basement or wherever you chose to put a sunbed. So now fake tan's moved on a long way. We wouldn't have had to really go to the skin damage side of things. We could have just thrown chemicals on ourselves.

[Josh Dean]

They also took a trip to the English coast for more photos.

[Sarah Thornton]

I really enjoyed going over to Caton Bay and running into the North Sea when it was absolutely freezing. That was great fun. I think one of our tutors, Ben Reed, he had a house over that way and he recognized the headland, but he didn't say anything. We took some photographs up at what had been a holiday camp place up near there that had this sort of sculptural 1950s, sort of realistic, kind of big feature. And we all leaned up on that. And apparently they just filmed Little Voice there with Is it Jane Horrocks?

[Josh Dean]

The movie was well known at the time. It got loads of award nominations and a Golden Globe win for its star, Michael Caine.

[Sarah Thornton]

That was another thing that a few people that saw things thought, oh, that's not Spain, that's Yorkshire. You know, that's near Scarborough.

[Josh Dean]

Which goes to show the clues were always there, which was kind of the point. The Leeds 13 were creating something that looked plausible at a glance, but also something that would fall apart the moment anyone did even a little work. Although they'd kept it a secret from almost everyone, they did need allies, like at the airport.

[Sarah Thornton]

What are airports like now? There is no way you could ever do that. Post 9 11, the whole world of travel changed forever.

[Josh Dean]

But in 1990, they simply called the guy in charge and told him what they wanted to do. Almost unbelievably, he said, okay. He led them into arrivals, even let them add a fake flight to the tracking boards.

[Sarah Thornton]

He was a really great guy and he was happy to go along with us and he probably got into trouble for it. So that I'm not happy about. We weren't like duping. We weren't lying. We just didn't expect the snowball to become as huge as it was. And that might have implications for somebody who was a really sweet gent.

[Josh Dean]

Everything came together with almost no hiccups.

[Sarah Thornton]

The high jinks of it, the frolics of it, the camaraderie, you know, that feeling like you're doing something altogether for the greater good of the world of art and ourselves. Just, yeah, all of it was phenomenal. And I look back with a massive fondness.

[Josh Dean]

And Griselda was loving it. Her students had clearly been paying attention.

[Griselda Pollock]

We just thought, this is so brilliant. This is so brilliant because every detail of it is a signifier, right? It was comparable to if you took a Raphael painting and you say, I'm going to work out how all of this works. Where's the composition? Where's the tension? Where's the shock? Where's the turn?

[Josh Dean]

That turn was their coming out to the world. We'll see exactly how that played out after the break. Summer has a way of making everything feel a little more relaxed, especially when it comes to getting dressed. One thing I love about our hottest season is putting on those comfortable go anywhere pieces that effortlessly become everyday staples. That's where Quince comes in. Their 100% European linen pants and shirts are incredibly breathable and easy to throw on, starting at just 34 bucks. And their ultra soft tees are perfect for these scorching days. Beyond elevated style, they also carry incredible premium home goods like organic cotton sheets and linen duvet covers. I've been so impressed with Quince's denim too. The slim fit jeans I just got are the perfect balance between a structured, durable fit and a remarkably soft feel. Make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quince.comchameleon for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.comchameleon for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comchameleon what if upgrading your windows and

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[Podcast Promos (various hosts: Ashley Flowers, Yvette Gentile & Racha Pecorero, Kylie Lowe)]

Sometimes, in the quiet corners of our world, or even in the glaring light of day, events unfold that defy the very fabric of reason. There is no scientific, logical, or readily apparent explanation for what we witness. It challenges our understanding, our beliefs, and even our sanity. Why do these things happen? What forces are at play? I'm Yvette Gentile. And I'm her sister, Racha Pecorero. Every week on our podcast so Supernatural, we dive deep into some of the earth's most bizarre and inexplicable occurrences. We don't just observe them. We actively try to explain the unexplainable. So if you're ready to have your perceptions challenged and your curiosity ignited, listen to so Supernatural every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Dean]

This is Chameleon, the weekly.

[Sarah Thornton]

We had gone on this holiday. We had squandered that amount of money, of taxpayers money on this holiday that we were calling out. And really we were just sunning ourselves on the Costa del Sol and being at the taxpayers, you know, like, favor.

[Josh Dean]

But as the tabloid headlines raged across England, the journalists who'd written them had no idea that none of it had actually happened.

[Sarah Thornton]

We waited till all them had gone out. The front lines were out there, and then we had the Today program.

[Josh Dean]

The Today program is the BBC's flagship morning radio news program, listened to by millions of Brits as they wake up, eat breakfast, and do the school run.

[Griselda Pollock]

It might have been cheeky and funny and everything, but it wasn't really art, was it?

[Sarah Thornton]

And I think John says, oh, can I just stop you there? And he explains that it hadn't actually happened and we hadn't been away, and that the whole thing was an elaborate simulation.

[Griselda Pollock]

The reality of the whole event was

[Sarah Thornton]

the way it's been perceived by everyone else and not the actual holiday, because it didn't actually happen. So that was the moment when everything changed. It went absolutely unbelievably crazy. Cars full of journalists came from London up to outside the house, like, praying at the door. We were like under siege from it. One of the journalists got, like knocked down by a car or not badly injured at all, but in sort of that kind of the clamor and the explosive nature of wanting to get hold of us. It was just crazy.

[Josh Dean]

The story of the trick they'd pulled started to spread.

[Sarah Thornton]

It must have been a dry old day for news when that story broke, because it properly traveled.

[Josh Dean]

Sarah heard from her Family in Ireland. CNN picked it up in the us. The story traveled as far as China. In a pre social media world, when news didn't move at the speed it does now, this was massive.

[Sarah Thornton]

That's quite a big feeling, to have had that much reach from a concept, an idea that's come from a collective of people talking.

[Josh Dean]

The Leeds 13 knew their idea was good and they had pulled it off.

[Sarah Thornton]

It showed up the machine for what it was. They took the story without thinking, right, well, we might look into this a bit further or get in touch with the airport. They wanted to run with the negative side of it without actually checking it out. That was what was expected in some ways. So I think we felt vindicated.

[Josh Dean]

The project had momentum and from here things continued to spiral. The stunt made the high profile news quiz. Have I got news for you.

[Sarah Thornton]

Round two this week relaunches itself with

[Josh Dean]

the accuracy of a Scud missile at

[Griselda Pollock]

the ever tempting target of tabloid journales.

[Sarah Thornton]

Costa del Spoof.

[Josh Dean]

Now the conversation across media had more nuanced. The students had their supporters as well as their detractors. In the old days when it was

[Griselda Pollock]

art, you'd paint a picture and say,

[Sarah Thornton]

look, that's a good picture.

[Josh Dean]

Now I'm going to do another one. In 30 years time they're going to be coming back saying, I've been to Tory Molinos this time.

[Sarah Thornton]

It's not going to work again, is it? But I think they did it really well within the parameters of the job.

[Josh Dean]

Doesn't that mean they're going to make very good burglars and con men rather than good artists? I suppose the same thing, really.

[Sarah Thornton]

It caused conversations, fundamental questions about art and identity and culture. These were things that we were grappling with and things that we wanted to be talked about. The outing turned the mirror onto the press itself.

[Josh Dean]

The Leeds 13 were suddenly everywhere. They'd gone from students with a clever idea and a big secret to highly public figures. They were invited to the Turner Prize, the highbrow art competition the same year. It was dominated by Tracey Emmons famous unmade bed, and also to the Big Breakfast, the coolest, brashest breakfast TV show around.

[Sarah Thornton]

The concentrated experience of the 1990s pop stars. It was like a fusion of all that, like on steroids, going mental, like bright vibes, being picked up by a driver in a massive Range Rover and hurtled down to London at about 4 in the morning. It was just like stepping into another world that was dizzying.

[Josh Dean]

And in the real world, Sarah says, most people loved the project. After all the only people who came out of it looking stupid were the press.

[Sarah Thornton]

We got a lot more support from people, everyday folk. The letters that had come in from guys. I don't know much about art, but I know I like and I like this. There was a lot of love for the project.

[Griselda Pollock]

When anybody says, you know, what do you do? And I say, I'm an art historian. They say, well, what's that when it's a tome, Artistry is so remote from most people's experience, right? So the fact that they did this as a sort of in a working class way, they raised a finger to the whole establishment and to this aura around art. It's pompous, it's classy, it's elite, it's esoteric. I don't understand, et cetera.

[Sarah Thornton]

A lot of the responses we had were from people that just so it didn't feel like it was trying to be up its own ass, you know, it was very real and it made people think and it made them giggle.

[Josh Dean]

The ride had been exhilarating, but now there was a sense that the thing they had birthed with going places was developing a life of its own.

[Sarah Thornton]

There was points where it did feel like a little bit out of control. It's taken out of your hands. I think we all felt a little bit exhausted, a little bit bewildered. You leave your ego at the door when you invite the press in. They're gonna write what they want. They're gonna see the story through their prism and what they want to get from it, really, for their viewers. But how can you ever have control of a narrative that you've thrown out there?

[Josh Dean]

A lot of the press failed to see the humor in the student stunt. And once that cat was out of the bag, they continued to dismiss its value as art. They kept pushing the same points and trying to divide the group by singling out the leaders, who they assumed were the boys, to undermine the collective spirit of the Leeds 13.

[Sarah Thornton]

That felt painful and wrong, to be honest. We all had a voice, the system that we were trying to take on and look at, you could see its power in how it related the story back to the general public.

[Josh Dean]

That was kind of the point. It was always intended as a provocation, but it brought a bit of discomfort, too, and maybe more so, looking back in today's world of fake news deployed as weaponry was going places, an inspiration

[Sarah Thornton]

in moments of craziness. I think, my God, you know, is it our fault that fake news and narratives like that have become so prominent as the tools within, like regimes and then I think, oh, God, who do you think you are? It's like once the horse has left the stable, you don't know if it's gonna bolt into the forest or whether it's going to trample over people.

[Josh Dean]

Things did die down. Finally going places was never meant to be anything other than a very bright flash in the pan. And for the Leeds 13, their thoughts turned back to their degrees. They still had a final show to come up with.

[Sarah Thornton]

We all came back in the next year thinking, oh, God, what are we going to do? You know, where do we go from here?

[Josh Dean]

It was almost the definition of the crushingly difficult second album.

[Sarah Thornton]

How could you do something not to top it? How could you do something? That was the conversation to have with that. What we did realise is that we were in a unique position because we were suddenly known. We were sort of a student collective that had big voices that had made ourselves noticed through a collective piece of work. In a very individualistic, capitalistic system of the art machine at that point, how

[Josh Dean]

could the students stay true to the ideas of the collective, maintain their integrity and still move the conversation forward? The next year rolled around and the group sent out another invite, another exhibition, this time on the top floor of an office building in Leeds. People walked in to see what looked like a typical art exhibition. Sculptures on stands, paintings hung on walls. In fact, to people who knew art, it would have been incredibly familiar. Was that a Jeff Koons? Damien Hirst, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Moore? It sure looked like it. Well, it actually was work by these artists. The students had used their newfound fame and got artists in collections to lend them work for their show. And they'd mix these superstar artists with the work of underrepresented, unknown and local artists.

[Sarah Thornton]

We had all sorts of pieces. We built an exhibition of conflicting and contrasting and sort of like, I don't know, ideas that snuggled up to each other as well. It was a beautiful thing.

[Josh Dean]

And they'd funded it themselves through friends and through Leeds nightlife, their community, a wider collective.

[Sarah Thornton]

We were able to just build something that was unique and it wasn't just about. It wasn't about us any longer.

[Josh Dean]

But what they had done was controversial because they'd put on an exhibition of other people's work.

[Sarah Thornton]

It was, you know, they're at it again kind of thing.

[Josh Dean]

They were throwing one final challenge to their tutors and the whole institution of the university.

[Griselda Pollock]

They defined it by saying, okay, we will put on for our degree show nothing that we have made. They borrowed all this work and then their Catalog was a complete issue of quotations. And they said, you either, you know, in a sense, say, this is a scam, this is a fake. You know, this is a hoax. There's no artistic significance for it. Or else, you know, the Griseldas and the Terry Atkinson. You have to, in a sense, recognize that we have learned what you've taught us. You've taught us about Duchamp, you've taught us about all these things, right? And now we are going to make the most radical gesture. Any group of fine artists, I mean, ever, I think, but at that point, ever did. They took on the radicals in the institution and said, how radical are you? Can we test the institutional model that you've been challenging to the limit?

[Josh Dean]

Universities are set up to award the work of individuals. But the Leeds 13 were determined to be seen as a group. So if the university accepted this as a brilliant piece of conceptual art, it had to award all of them.

[Sarah Thornton]

There was no way we were going to be going back to being individual artists. It just wasn't a thing.

[Josh Dean]

But as individuals, their grades mattered and would potentially define whatever they decided to do. After university. The students were taking a real risk.

[Griselda Pollock]

They took on their teachers. They said, okay, you radicalized us. You asked us to think about gender, class, race, sexuality, and indeed, philosophy. This question of what is it that does not practice? So the leads 13 played that back and said, okay, you've said to us, art is what it incites you to have to think about. And we are a collective. So you either pass us all or you fail us all. Could it give people a degree for a collective operation? And in a certain. A performance that had no object?

[Josh Dean]

Well, they needn't have worried. Everyone was given the highest grade possible

[Griselda Pollock]

because it was so bloody brilliant. I mean, it was so thought through at every level.

[Sarah Thornton]

So we needed to rage against the machine, you know, so. But it was okay.

[Josh Dean]

After University, the Leeds 13 continued to work together on other projects over the years. But they would never hit the headlines again in quite the same way. Things moved on, people moved on, but they all stay in touch. Now, 30 years later, everyone's busy.

[Sarah Thornton]

They've got lives, families, successful careers. I have got the family. I have got the art life and all the rest of it. But it's part of my remit. It's just such an important part of my life story. I think, for me, it's this beautiful jewel of experience in time that I felt like I made a difference. And, you know, that's a nice thing to think back about.

[Josh Dean]

In A sense. The conversations these 13 students started with going places never stopped. People remember and still ask about it.

[Sarah Thornton]

We've had a big art baby, and every so often we need to look in and check that it's okay. So it kind of. It does connect us. Oh, it's appeared again. All right. And, like, can I just turn it into a film? Can I have a Netflix series, please? You know, can my disco balls be everywhere on every wall? I can earn a decent living. Yeah, yeah. You know, so, yeah, it's all good.

[Josh Dean]

I don't think the Leeds 13 could pull off what they did today. The Internet has just changed the world so much. But the questions they asked of the press machine are still extremely relevant.

[Sarah Thornton]

It's left the cage of our imaginations and gone out into a very different world.

[Josh Dean]

If you ask Griselda, this is because it worked. This apparent stunt of a project was such an incredibly accomplished work of art.

[Griselda Pollock]

They took all of this stuff in, but they did something that was shocking because it's completely creative. It transforms it, and it's explicit. You can explain it in a sense, but you can't explain it away because it's transformed its materials into something which then we spend our time think, thinking, oh, gosh. It deals with pattern, it deals with that, and it addresses that. And it does all these sorts of things because it was art and kind

[Josh Dean]

of like having a real life child. When you bring something into the world, you need to let it find its own way. How people react to going places. Now, that's all part of it. Sarah loves it, but she's also let it go.

[Sarah Thornton]

You can't police responses that have come from it. You know, it's all valid. The good, the bad, the ugly, the sublime, the weird. The prism of everything is just how it is. You know, it's a myriad of different responses and of course, other artists and brilliant, really, that it's still got a life and it's still talked about and it's still sort of garnering some new vibes out in the stratosphere of whateverness.

[Josh Dean]

In a sense, the whole thing ended where it began, with a collective. It's just that now the collective includes so much more than it did at the beginning, when it was just a series of conversations between 13 students on a campus in Northern England.

[Sarah Thornton]

There's always conversations that you can get from it and you can add to it. It's a bit like my philosophy behind the mirror ball. Each little square of the mirror ball, once subjected to light, throws other lights onto a surface that go from being a square to a circle and then disappear. But it keeps turning, do you know what I'm saying? It's refracted and moves on and is in perpetual motion and I think that sort of like myriad of ideas and the mirror ball sort of like configure in some way, you know. So I'll pull that into my art practice somehow.

[Josh Dean]

Thank you to Sarah Thornton and the rest of the Leeds 13. There's actually 15 of them now. Since the show they've added a couple of members Laura Baxter, Simon Clark, John Crossley, Matthew Dunning, Hannah Foote, Christian Hersey, Sharn Jones, Jenny Larkin, Sarah Leach, Emma Robertson, Eleanor Walsh, Susanna Wellesley, Victoria Anderson and Ben Halsall. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean and was written by me and Joe Barrett. It was produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimac themed by Ewin Leitrimuin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Sher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help and if you have any feedback, tips or story ideas, you can email [e-mail] or leave us a message at a special number we've set up, 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

[Podcast Promos (various hosts: Ashley Flowers, Yvette Gentile & Racha Pecorero, Kylie Lowe)]

I think Chuck would approve.

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[Podcast Promos (various hosts: Ashley Flowers, Yvette Gentile & Racha Pecorero, Kylie Lowe)]

Every case file, interview and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lowe and on my podcast Dark down east, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover. I don't just retell crime stories, I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The result? True crime storytelling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark down east, wherever you get your podcasts.