ABSTRACT
Like the trickster figure of American Indian mythology studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963), one of the core characteristics of cultural journalists is their dual nature. Cultural journalists inhabit and mediate between two distinct social realms, the world of culture and the world of journalism, and like the trickster of myth, their anomalous role is often associated with moral ambiguity. They are, on the one hand, culture-heroes who bring culture to the masses while simultaneously bringing audiences to cultural producersmaking both society and cultural production possible, as Lévi-Strauss depicted the trickster’s role. On the other hand, they are often described as subversive: first, by journalists, who see them as cultural patriots lacking critical distance to their sources; and second, by cultural producers, who see them as cultural buffoons, tastemakers without taste buds who, by imposing an outside logic (journalistic, commercial, of personal taste, etc.), transmit the wrong culture, dumb-down the public, and, by a carnivalesque logic, drape the tramps of the cultural world in kings’ robes.
