Welcome to our list of Bay Area arts and culture trends in 2023. Notably, it was a year that few are describing as “the worst year ever,” as many year-end listmakers were understandably wont to do for a while. We also suppose this list could have included things like AI, driverless cars, robot deliveries and the metaverse. It was just Tom Waits’ birthday; let’s let him weigh in.
Here’s to you all, individually and collectively, love and happiness in 2024.
The Return of the Monoculture
Twelve years after Touré’s defining treatise “Why I Miss the Monoculture,” the monoculture is back, for better or for worse. Taylor Swift alone absolutely dominated the recording, streaming and touring industry, while captivating the box office, the UC system, TIME magazine, and our nation’s elected officials — and Beyoncé was not far behind. Barbie and Oppenheimer took the nation’s multiplexes by storm, and superhero franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy, Spider-Man and Ant-Man filled out the Top 10 box office list. In other words, if you needed common ground to talk about with coworkers, you had plenty to pick from this year.—Gabe Meline
The End of Immersive ‘Art Experiences’
Let me tell you one thing I didn’t miss this year: being immersed in a so-called art experience. 2022 was full of Immersive van Gogh spawn (a frankly offensive Frida Kahlo, a fine-by-comparison Picasso thing at the Armory). Those events, in turn, were the immaterial outcome of the Color Factory, the Museum of Ice Cream and (my personal least favorite) the 90’s Experience. Strangely, we’ve now come full circle: the immersive photo-op has phase-shifted back into physical artwork and taken up residence at our largest museum, courtesy of SFMOMA’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition, which literally costs $10 a minute. If museums learned one thing from all the immersive offshoots over the years, it’s that people will pay top dollar for a limited amount of time in an audio-visual experience utterly stripped of context.—Sarah Hotchkiss
San Francisco Spending Millions Trying to Rebrand Itself
Imagine you live elsewhere, and your understanding of San Francisco is essentially Fox News footage of people pillaging Walgreens. But wait! You encounter a bus ad: “It All Starts Here.” Are you overcome with desire to travel to SF? How about “Always San Francisco,” does that do anything for you? This is, as far as I can tell, the scenario on which city leaders and a handful of tech billionaires wagered a combined $10 million in 2023, attempting to reverse reputational damage caused by a dearth of affordable housing, an absurd cost of living and a devastating fentanyl crisis with marketing. Does this feel a little like the captain of the Titanic launching a social media rebrand mid-collision? Sure! Do nuanced discussions of public health, inequality and long-term investments in the arts make for snappy copy in politicians’ campaign materials? Not really! But hey, maybe we just haven’t come up with the right slogan yet. In the meantime, we have this new “San Francisco theme song,” about which I will say: We miss you, Tony Bennett.—Emma Silvers
The Bay Area’s (Mom-and-Pop) Restaurant Scene Isn’t Dead Yet
These days, keeping a restaurant afloat in the Bay Area seems like an impossible task — an unwinnable battle against thieves, vandals and an overall “sea of lawlessness.” Or so goes the prevailing narrative, anyway. A few Oakland restaurateurs even declared a (largely overblown, hour-long) “strike” in protest. And it’s true that crime (and, nearly as bad, the perception of crime) is a real concern. This isn’t an economy that leaves much margin for error, and the sheer economics of the Bay have snuffed out a lot of innovation at the highest end. Still, anyone lamenting the death of Bay Area food hasn’t been eating out at the same places we have — not when 2023 has gifted us with S-tier Haitian comfort food, idiosyncratic little Thai cafes serving dessert rotis and “gay pink milk,” and joyously off-kilter Indian egg restaurants. Now as always, when it comes to niche, street-level mom-and-pops, the Bay remains undefeated.—Luke Tsai
The A’s Resent You
Well, the A’s owners do, at least. That much was confirmed in 2023, during which, instead of my usual seven or eight games at the greatest ballpark in America, I could only bring myself to go to one. Finally, after years of neglect, the A’s owner — I’d say his name, but it’d have to be accompanied by the foulest string of obscenities imaginable — acquired approval from Major League Baseball to move the whole sad, desiccated team southward to sad, desiccated Las Vegas. Sure, there’s another baseball team coming to town. But 2023 was the year of the “SELL” T-shirt, and the broken hearts of longtime fans.—Gabe Meline
A Pro-Palestinian Uprising Larger Than Ever
This year saw the largest, most cohesive wave of pro-Palestinian protests ever. In the Bay Area, Richmond became the first American city to pass a ceasefire resolution, followed by Oakland. Bay Area artists, in particular, rallied in protest of Israel’s most recent siege of Gaza, which has so far killed more than 15,000 Palestinians. Artists raised upwards of $13,000 for Palestinian children at a November fundraiser in Oakland, matched in the restaurant scene with support for and by Palestinian businesses and eateries here in the Bay Area. Even local surfers got involved, screening the documentary Gaza Surf Club to call upon their community to advocate for a ceasefire. With their dollars, poetry, policy, food and organized boycotts, Bay Area folks are showing up for Palestinians now more than ever.—Olivia Mayeda
The Music Industry Making it Harder to Be an Artist — and Fan
In 2023, we convinced ourselves that paying Ticketmaster hundreds of dollars in fees would be a fair exchange for experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime Beyoncé tour. But throughout the year, the ubiquitous ticketing company drove up prices for large and small concerts alike with those exorbitant add-on fees, all while its parent company, Live Nation, pocketed record profits. Meanwhile, independent touring musicians continued to lose money amidst post-pandemic gas prices and inflation. Songtradr bought Bandcamp and laid off staff including the entire union bargaining committee, prompting a labor complaint, and Spotify announced that it will stop paying royalties on songs with under 1,000 streams. The music industry is increasingly stacked against up-and-coming musicians, which is why it’s all the more important to be intentional about supporting our local artists.—Nastia Voynovskaya
Watch Me Eat This Pupusa The Size of Your Head and sMasH tHaT LiKe bUtToN!!
Anyone chronically on TikTok and Instagram has probably already noticed this year’s biggest food trend: the proliferation of local, raucous, personality-driven food influencers. From the humorous caricatures of The Snack Sensei and BayAreaFoodz to the health-focused feed of Bizerkeley Vegan and lavish outings of Allie Eats (nearly half a million followers combined between the four accounts), there’s more bombastic food-related content than ever from the Bay Area. Viral videos of an oversized pupusa or a pan dulce big enough to use as a literal pillow has fueled a new wave of extravagant restaurateurs catering to the frenzy by super-sizing, quadruple-dipping and gold-flaking everything under the sun — often collabing with foodie accounts to build hype. And all of our internet-marinated brains seem to be eating it up.—Alan Chazaro
Barbie Burnout
At first it was like, yay, girly pop culture moment and female director from Sacramento making hella bank, but then it was like, why is every commercial this very specific shade of pink and why are all the makeup stores pink, and the clothing stores, and the shoe stores, and why is that Burger King burger pink, and why is my Google search pink, and is it okay that everyone’s making memes that combine Barbie and the actual atomic bomb, and what the hell is an Ice Spice Munchkin, and isn’t it a bit weird that the TSA used Barbie in a knives warning, and isn’t the end of the movie where Barbie goes to the gynecologist actually lazy and reductive, and wouldn’t it have been better if she was in the Mattel CEO chair instead because women aren’t allowed that very often, and actually, just forget it, because even though Allan is the literal greatest, I want nothing to do with any of this now.—Rae Alexandra
Billionaires Ruining the Internet’s Usefulness
While TikTok continues to drive culture and dominate discourse among young people, adults like Elon Musk (“adults,” ha) couldn’t figure out what to do with their social media platforms if it walked up and hit them with a Cybertruck. Meta did what it always does and copied an existing platform with Threads. BlueSky didn’t fully catch on, Mastodon is a distant memory, and BeReal kinda withered and died. And, in the midst of it all, Google Search became more useless than ever, prompting users seeking information to be fed pages of ads, or worse, AI-generated garbage. (This is where I repeat my catchphrase: subscribe to a newspaper.)—Gabe Meline
A Flood of Celebrity Memoirs
The secret to publishing a NYT-bestselling blockbuster this year seemed to lie in aristocracy. Celebrity memoirs have never gone out of style, but the monumental success of Prince Harry’s Spare and pop music royalty Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me, which sold over 1.6 million and 1.1 million copies in the U.S. alone in their first weeks, shifted the spotlight back on the genre in 2023. For those of us seeking even more juicy, reflective stories from our aspirational tax bracket, memoirs from Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, Elliot Page, Pamela Anderson and Jada Pinkett Smith did not disappoint. Pro tip: These memoirs make great stocking stuffers for the pop culture fanatics in your life.—Ugur Dursun
The Great Pants Awakening
I went to high school in the late aughts, when we all traded low-rise flares for skinny jeans, so I’ve been studying the latest Great Pants Awakening like an anthropologist, gathering data on BART and TikTok, and surveying friends and family members of all ages. Some millennials dared to break up with our beloved tapered legs and waist-cinching highrise trousers, while others clung on to their favorite cuts for dear life. Meanwhile, new pants styles challenged all generations to reconsider their notions of beauty, gender and even propriety. Unisex cargo pants paired with a baggy hoodie to hide the body; thong-revealing ultra-low-rise with nipple-baring mesh on top. It’s all fair game, and both looks can be seen on the same person in a given week. 2023 was all about poly-pantism: the way of the future.—Nastia Voynovskaya
Too Many Movie Theaters Biting the Dust
Despite some hopeful reopenings such as San Francisco’s 4-Star Theater, the Bay Area’s movie theaters continue to roll credits and close down for good. The Albany Twin, the Century Theater in San Francisco’s Westfield Mall, the CGV (formerly the AMC) on Van Ness, the Rohnert Park Reading cinema and others all shuttered. “But we can watch movies at home now,” you might say! Joke’s on you, bub: fees for streaming subscriptions got significantly more expensive. After three years of other tough-to-swallow theater closures, and tumult for fans of movies at the Castro, we’re happy for even the smallest bit of good news for local theaters.—Gabe Meline
Lots of Love for Sign Painting (and Signs in General)
With a healthy local sign painting scene, it’s no surprise we saw a lot of this work in gallery spaces this year — and a greater appreciation for the artistry of signs, period. Lauren D’Amato’s solo at House of Seiko borrowed from real-life Bayview signs, and she later received the Headlands’ Tournesol Award for an emerging Bay Area painter. The inaugural show at Berkeley’s 127010, curated by Oliver Hawk Holden, focused on artists merging commercial craft and fine art (a gold leaf and enamel piece by sign painter Michelle “Meng” Nguyen was a standout). And Pacific Saw Works, a new artist-run space in Oakland, christened their walls with a show of sign painters called, simply, Signs. I also need to mention the legislation that passed late last year to make it easier to repair old neon signs (which often include painted elements) and install new ones in the Tenderloin. This year, we saw the electric results.—Sarah Hotchkiss
TV Going Peak ’80s and ’90s
My childhood was the 1980s, my teen years coincided with the ’90s, and goddamnit, the streaming platforms really played into my rapidly aging hands this year. In 2023, I finally got to rewatch Moonlighting (the endearingly preposterous detective show that launched Bruce Willis’ career) and unabashedly immerse myself in L.A. Law at an age where I could actually understand it. But nowhere has ’80s and ’90s nostalgia shown up harder than in celebrity documentaries. Watching retrospectives about Thriller-era Michael Jackson, Michael J. Fox, Wham!, Pamela Anderson, Anna Nicole Smith, the Gladiators, Robbie Williams, David Beckham and, yes, even Apple TV+’s far too rose-tinted profile of The Super Models was like seeing my first 20 years of life flash before my eyes. My middle-aged ass is clearly being pandered to — and I absolutely love it.—Rae Alexandra
