Sometimes silence is the clearest answer. Another email to a bookstore vanishes unanswered into digital nothingness. No rejection, no explanation — just silence. Occasionally, a brief response arrives: one must be more "diverse" nowadays. I smile bitterly. Diversity is important — but doesn't it actually mean variety rather than exclusion?
But these bridges are increasingly becoming one-way streets. Whatever doesn't fit into the tightly knit grid of contemporary moral concepts gets sorted out — through silence or, if at all, politely but firmly.
You might think: "That's surely exaggerated!" Then let's stroll through Frankfurt together. In the venerable Hugendubel at Hauptwache, you'll now experience a kind of cultural scavenger hunt: books hide like Easter eggs between glitter pens and plush doorstops. Thematic organization was yesterday, bazaar is today.
At Walther König near Kleinmarkthalle, you can at least still find art volumes. Above all Helmut Newton, stoically gazing from the shop window for over a decade.
And did you know that one of the city's most fascinating photo book collections is hidden upstairs in the Leica Store? Probably not. Because downstairs, gentlemen in immaculate suits stand before display cases with cameras that make your bank balance sweat — as if access to the world of images upstairs were only permitted with a Platinum membership card.
Speaking of visual worlds: My own works follow a different approach. They are deliberately reduced, avoiding attention-seeking poses and artificial drama. What counts is the dialogue between woman and environment, between vitality and sensuality.
Yet this very simplicity is often misunderstood — as if reduction were synonymous with superficiality, as if real art needed complicated explanations or political justifications. As if eroticism were forbidden.
A gallery owner friend recently said: "Previously, we had to defend our art from conservatives. Today, it's from the supposedly progressive." He's right. But the new cultural gatekeepers no longer come with a wagging finger, but with a club of prohibition.
Don't get me wrong: social progress is important. But must it come with cultural self-censorship? Art thrives on discourse, dialogue, different perspectives.
When we start sorting it according to its supposed political correctness, it loses its most important quality: the ability to provoke thought.