Summary of Going Places: The College Art Students Who Fooled a Nation

Overview of Going Places: The College Art Students Who Fooled a Nation

This episode of Chameleon tells the story of the Leeds 13, a collective of art students in 1990s northern England who staged a fake holiday to Spain as a conceptual art project. What began as a student exhibition stunt turned into a national media frenzy, exposing how tabloid journalism works, how easily narratives can be manufactured, and how class and prejudice shaped the way the press treated young artists.

What Happened in the “Going Places” Hoax

The premise

• The Leeds 13 planned an art project called “Going Places.”
• They pretended to take a package holiday to the Costa del Sol.
• In reality, they never left England.

How they pulled it off

• They disappeared from campus for a week.
• They used safe houses, disguises, and careful coordination.
• They created fake evidence:
  • a forged postcard with a Spanish postmark
  • staged photographs meant to look like holiday snaps
  • tanned appearances that made the lie more believable
• They even got help from someone at the airport, including access to arrivals and a fake flight on the board.

The reveal

• The students let the story circulate until it reached national attention.
• They then revealed the truth on the BBC’s Today programme: the holiday had been fabricated.
• At that point, the media reaction exploded.

Why the Project Mattered Artistically

A conceptual art statement

• The episode frames the stunt as conceptual art, not just a prank.
• The students were influenced by the Leeds art department’s radical approach:
  • art history + studio practice
  • feminism, post-colonialism, social history, and cultural studies
• Their tutors, especially Griselda Pollock, encouraged students to think about:
  • reference
  • deference
  • difference
• The project was meant to show that art can be an idea, a performance, and a critique—not just an object.

The deeper target

• The real artwork was not the fake holiday itself.
• It was the media response:
  • tabloid outrage
  • lazy assumptions about students and artists
  • class bias
  • the press’s appetite for scandal over verification

Media Reaction and Public Fallout

Press outrage

• Local and national papers ran with the story as if the students had wasted public money on a luxury trip.
• Headlines mocked them as con artists and “piss artists.”
• Journalists treated the story as proof of student pretension and entitlement.

Public response

• Many ordinary people actually loved the stunt.
• It resonated as a smart, funny takedown of the establishment and the tabloid press.
• The episode suggests the students exposed how easily the press could be manipulated when it wanted a juicy story.

Broader cultural context

• The story landed in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, when public distrust of tabloids was especially high.
• That made the students’ hoax feel like a sharp critique of media power and sensationalism.

Aftermath for the Leeds 13

Their final degree show

• The group followed up with another provocative exhibition.
• They borrowed works from famous artists and mixed them with pieces by lesser-known and local artists.
• Their exhibition catalog was built around quotations, reinforcing the idea of artistic lineage and collective authorship.
• The university ultimately gave them top marks, recognizing the work as deeply thought-out conceptual art.

Long-term legacy

• The Leeds 13 continued making work together, though they never again got the same level of attention.
• Years later, they remain connected, and the project still circulates as an example of:
  • collaborative art
  • media critique
  • performance as social commentary

Key Takeaways

• Art can be a trap: “Going Places” was designed to lure the press into revealing its own biases.
• The stunt was the point: the truth of the work lay in the reaction it provoked.
• Collective authorship mattered: the Leeds 13 challenged the idea that art has to be made and judged individually.
• The project was ahead of its time: its themes—fake news, narrative manipulation, media performance—feel even more relevant now.
• It remains a landmark piece of conceptual art: shocking, funny, political, and deliberately hard to pin down.

Notable Idea at the Heart of the Episode

The real art wasn’t the fake holiday. It was the way the students exposed the machinery of media, class prejudice, and public perception by making the press tell the story for them.