Have we got the audacity to do this?
We need to disappear for a while.
They are the students who hoaxed Fleet Street.
They hoaxed the hacks.
Our art piece became the biggest hoax of 1998.
We deliberately set out to manipulate the media in some way.
It went from just being a sort of small, angry story
to going all over the world.
The Yorkshire [Post].
-CNN. -Sky News.
Daily Mail,
It was like fake news before fake news.
There are famous hoaxes in history, and I don’t think it’s exaggerating
to say the Leeds 13 will have a place in that.
[OUR ART HOAX FOOLED A NATION]
My name is Sarah.
I’m an artist, and I’m one of the Leeds 13.
My name is Matthew.
I was an art student and one of the Leeds 13.
The press actually gave us our name.
We were all studying fine art at the University of Leeds.
We all studied together.
Lots of us lived together. We all socialized together.
Project
We were all thinking about
what we should really be doing for our third-year show,
and we decided that we’d do something collectively, as a team.
We wanted to get back down to the grassroots of what art could be
and how far you could push it.
We could see what a massive hold the media have on the population,
and we thought we’d see where we could go with it.
What about fundraising?
Got anything?
We were going to apply to The Arts Society, stuff like that.
To really make this work,
there was a number of things that we had to do.
The plan was we were going to fake a holiday.
It was going to look like we'd been to Malaga.
We had flight tickets that we faked.
We basically scanned in plane tickets and altered them on Photoshop.
We had locations that we went to shoot on
to create our holiday snaps.
You’d have seen what looked like a picture of young people
enjoying themselves on the beach.
But the reality is that we were in a Scarborough beach,
north of England, freezing cold, still in winter.
So we put a blue filter on the camera,
and we hired a sunbed,
and we put it into one of the cellars.
A really nice pool,
sort of lounging about near the hotel.
The pool was in Chapel Allerton, Leeds,
a private property.
You kind of had to fish the scum out of the water before we got in it.
And we also--
Maybe the biggest coup was getting the airport,
Leeds Bradford Airport at the time, to let us back through arrivals,
which is a crazy thing to have done.
We wanted our people who came to the show
to come and meet us at the airport and see us get off that plane.
In fact, the airport were kind enough
to put the flight up on their screens.
And out we came, along with some extras who’d come along to help.
The Leeds student newspaper got involved because
this was a topic of conversation across campus.
Leeds Student,
The newspapers thought that we’d taken over £1,000 of grant money
and gone on holidays.
“Furious officials are demanding that
artists who splashed out over £1,000 of union money on a Spanish holiday
must repay the cash immediately.
The band did arrange an exhibition in Leeds Art Gallery last week,
but stunned guests arrived to find an empty studio.
They’re totally taking the piss.”
“Con Artists’ Spanish Rip-Off.
Art grant funds holiday in sun.”
They went with a particularly lovely photograph
of two of the members sitting on the beach.
It just went crazy.
Sunday Mirror, Yorkshire Evening Post,
Yorkshire Post,
The Express, The Sport,
The Guardian, Times
“Piss artists.”
“A group of students got a £1,000 grant
to do something artistic,
so they became piss artists on a massive holiday binge.”
I think we were particularly proud of that title.
We were feeling smug around the fact that we pulled this thing off,
but at the same time, we were feeling sick
the whole time this happened
because it was a really intense moment,
and we were terrified that we were going to get found out any minute.
A viewer may have said, you know,
“This is very typical of art students.”
You know, “They’re lazy. They waste taxpayers’ money.”
People like the union have spent, as I understand it,
a long, long time trying to raise money for a coach for the disabled.
They hand this money to you.
They don’t see that this has anything to do with art.
OK. First of all, I’d like to say we inevitably have been selfish,
and I don’t deny that.
But sometimes, you have to push to get the exposure.
Interrogated on camera...
and still keeping up the pretense of the fact that we’d been.
But little did they know.
My name is Martin Wainwright,
and I was writing for
at the time of the Leeds 13 affair.
And it was all over the papers
that these students had gone off and had a binge at public expense.
I remember thinking, “This does sound a bit fishy.”
You know, it’s so blatant.
Back in the 90s,
the way the media operated was very narrow.
The tabloid newspapers had an enormous power
because they had very, very big circulations,
you know, 3, 4 million,
and the country took its agenda from a much narrower range of options.
It could be quite a frightening concentration of media power.
It stemmed from local newspapers picking things up first,
even micro-newspapers like parish magazines
or student union newspapers, in this case.
That made it a bit easier
for people plotting to upset these channels.
We were really aware in our minds
of when we wanted to break the real story,
which is that we hadn’t gone on holiday,
we hadn’t spent the taxpayers’ money.
One of us went on the
John Crossley, it might have been cheeky and funny and everything,
but it wasn't really art, was it?
Well, in the light of all the media hype
and everything that’s happened,
we want to introduce the possibility that it was all a simulation
and that the money was a complete non-issue
because, in fact, we didn’t spend it.
And for us, the reality of the whole event
was the way it’s been perceived by everyone else
and not the actual holiday
because it didn’t actually happen.
The reaction,
kind of stunned silence on the radio program.
It was a bit like, “So you’re telling me you didn’t go?”
I mean, the tension in that interview, the confusion,
I mean, it was great.
And actually, a huge relief because we now could tell the truth.
After we broke the news, things just erupted.
Story number two swung into operation,
which was much better than story number one.
You’ve been had.
Once it was obvious that this was a hoax,
there was a lot of coverage
because the mechanics of the hoax were so clever.
The phone didn’t stop ringing.
We woke up to a barrage of TV crews on our doorstep,
outside our student house in Leeds.
News teams from all over descended on one of the houses we lived in
and were falling over each other to get the story.
This house, they say, which they’d only leave in disguise.
The papers that ran with it were really annoyed
and angry that they’d been duped.
Wanted to interview the crazy students that had done this thing
and hoodwinked the media.
It’s about exposing the difficulties of authority, really,
and saying who is and who isn’t
and who has the authority to say, “This is art.”
So is me being here and interviewing you
part of the project as well?
Yeah.
Max Clifford, who actually kind of probably hit the nail on the head.
I mean, the whole thing’s hysterical
because, of course, it shows the media up in a light,
shall we say, that is going to cause an awful lot of embarrassment
to an awful lot of journalists.
The whole lecture that’s given to us by certain papers
that hold themselves up as being wonderfully informative
and always right is total nonsense from the start.
The
was one that we were really pleased with, actually,
because they properly engaged with
the ideas that we were discussing at the time,
rather than just sort of saying we were irresponsible.
When a group of art students from Leeds University
made a degree exhibition out of themselves
apparently conceptualizing on the Costa del Sol,
newspapers duly knee-jerked into action.
But I think they’re making a very serious point,
which is that the press have a pretty childish attitude
towards reporting art.
Cosmo Landesman.
It’s not great art. I don’t think it goes anywhere.
I don’t think it generates great debate.
I think he completely missed it.
Well, you know, as things go, it wasn’t immoral.
In a way, they tried to be original within a small, limited way.
They hadn’t properly looked into the story,
and they’ve run with it without doing the research.
But after their story had been swallowed
hook, line, and sinker by Fleet Street.
The Yorkshire art students that conned Fleet Street.
Yeah, that’s a good title.
Yeah, I agree with that.
We started having interest from other non-news shows as well.
The Big Breakfast
Big Breakfast
that were really loving this idea.
They were finding the whole hoax thing
really, you know, a lot of fun.
Please welcome Hannah Foot, Sarah Thornton, and Chris Hersey
from the fine arts course at Leeds University.
The twist in the story was that we actually didn't spend all the money.
And we think the British have got a great sense of humor,
and we thought they'd appreciate it.
OK, so where did you take all the photographs then?
Because there’s lots of photos of you frolicking in the Costa del Sol
that outraged Middle England.
That’s actually in Leeds, isn’t it?
That’s in Leeds?
And also, there were supposed to be 13 of them,
but all the pictures show 11.
I don’t know where the other two are.
One would be taking the picture.
To have Germaine Greer support you
on a show like
the highlight of the media moment.
I had a real high from it, you know.
It was really exciting.
The original story and the true story were both extremely entertaining.
All journalists would bite at that story.
The two things it exposed about the media
were the speed with which the media works,
and the media should be more honest about that
and put their hands up more often in the past and said,
“Actually, we got this wrong. We were in a rush.”
You shouldn’t believe everything you see, read, or are told.