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Outstanding among the rubbish were two pieces. The first was a black canvas with a thin yellow line around it; nothing else, just that. The second was probably the greatest waste-of-space, it was a work consisting of four large canvases, each about two metres square and completely black. The only other thing that you could say about them was that they alternated from flat black to a somewhat lumpy black. This is not art.
Fortunately the Art Gallery of South Australia is much better, it displays a lot of excellent art (as well as some modern rubbish). The art galleries of Warrnambool, Ballarat and Bendigo were also much better than the Perth gallery. (Later note: A visit to the south of the state in August 2022 showed that even Bunbury had a better art gallery than Perth's.) The people of Western Australia are unfortunate to have such a poorly run state art gallery.
I again visited the Perth gallery in January 2021 (see also update, on this page), it was just as bad, perhaps worse, I didn't see a single art work I liked. Perhaps the people of Perth have other, better run art galleries elsewhere in the city? (Some parts of the art gallery were closed, I suspect some good art was there. I know that on one visit I saw some great art in the basement.)
The adjacent Perth Museum has just been reopened after about five years (as of the end of 2020). It is excellent. Considering how far Perth is from any other major city the people have been culturally deprived, and it seems that they continue to be as far as their art gallery is concerned. They do have an excellent public library in the same part of the city.
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Are our art galleries are being run as well as they could be? What alternatives are there?
Art galleries could be run democratically. There could be some form of voting on what pieces should be bought and hung and what should not.As a starter, a section of each State-owned Australian art gallery could be required to devote one section to democratic selection. All pieces hung in this section could also be displayed on a page on the Internet. Against each representation on the Net page there could be a couple of buttons - approval and disapproval. For any 'art-work' to stay in this section of the gallery it would have to achieve some pre-set level of approval.
Update on Art Gallery of WA, October 2022
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I have found a virtual on-line tour of the older and better of the Perth gallery's art works a couple of times, but for some reason they don't make finding it at all easy. I was unable to find it at this time; had I been able to I would have included a URL here.
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What is art?
It seems to me that there are two properties that an object must have for it to rightly be called art: it must be an artefact and it must have impact on the viewer. The impact will often be beauty (and beauty is, of course, 'in the eye of the beholder'), but it could also be an emotional impact due to the 'story' that the work conveys; for example in a shocking photograph from a war or revolution. The impact might also be due to some striking quality in the work: perhaps lighting, some sort of strong contrast, composition.And it must draw the interest of the viewer in some way.
From this definition, many objects in modern galleries would not qualify as art.
Good architecture certainly can qualify as art.