Language and Art - Dissertation Tamara Bodden

Bodden, Tamara: Art and Money: A Discourse Linguistic Study of documenta 14. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2023.

"Leiter setzt Geld in den Sand" was the headline of the local Kassel newspaper HNA in August 2017, publishing leaked information from the supervisory board of documenta 14, a world-renowned art exhibition: documenta gGmbH was on the verge of insolvency, with a deficit of around 7 million euros expected. This is expected to be made up by partly public financing with tax revenue. A broad debate begins in which people from politics, the cultural sector and the public take part in interviews, petitions and reader comments and which deals with the use of taxes, the responsibility of cultural institutions and artistic freedom. The study looks at digital multimodal texts, the metaphors used in them, intertextual networks and the actors involved, and not only reconstructs the debate at documenta 14, but also examines the controversial relationship between art and the economy and how this influences our current system of cultural funding. The aim of the work is to reveal the hidden mechanisms that structure media discourses, to explore the limits of sayable spaces and to contribute to a sensitization of public opinion-forming processes.

You can find more information about the publicationhere.

Here you can access the current homepage of Tamara Bodden at the department "Semantics and Lexicology of Modern High German".

Simultaneously: Dissertation, University of Kassel, 2022, published under the title "Die öffentliche Finanzierung des Kulturbetriebs. Eine diskurslinguistische Untersuchung zur documenta 14", University of Kassel, Faculty 02, Humanities and Cultural Studies. Date of the disputation: 20.07.2022.