On finding your own argument already made, in another country, fifteen years ago
Two documents reached me sideways yesterday - the way the most useful things usually do - through Kayta Fels Smith a fellow-traveller in the Decelerator cohort I have been lucky enough to join. It is a loose company of people across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia who have found themselves circling the same unglamorous question: how do (cultural) organisations end well?
The first is Claudia Bach's Graceful Exit, written for Grantmakers in the Arts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The second is a debate text by Devon Smith, delivered at the Americans for the Arts conference in 2014 titled bluntly: we should allow failing arts organisations to die.
I read them the way you read anything that turns out to be about you - with a small vertigo. The argument I have been building under the name REGENERATE, the argument I have occasionally allowed myself to feel was new, is substantially present in both. Made in another country. Made fifteen years ago.
That is the first thing these pieces make plain -if a diagnosis this specific was available in 2009, restated in 2014, and is one im arriviagin at in Australia in 2026 that still feels urgent and still unmet - then the problem it describes is not an Australian anomaly, not a subsector's bad luck, and not an artefact of any single recession. It is structural. It has been visible, in at least four countries, for a decade and a half.
Two temperaments, one conclusion
Bach and Smith could hardly be less alike. Bach writes in the register of the deathbed and the wake. Her vocabulary is dignity, honour, ritual, grace, courage - the language we reach for at the end of a life. She is interested in how an organisation is accompanied to its close: how staff are honoured, how legacy and collective memory are held, how the people who carried the work are carried in turn. Hers is a stewardship ethic. Closures, she observes, rarely begin with the crisis that finishes them. The ending is a symptom made visible, not the disease.
Smith writes to provoke, and he is very good at it. His metaphors are agricultural and Darwinian — weeds choking the crop, the herd culled of its weak, the forest that regrows more beautifully after the fire. His mechanism is selection: stop propping up the unfit, concentrate resources on the strong, and let the market of attention and funding do what it does in every other industry. He wants impact metrics, an idea he calls impact bankruptcy, turnaround strategists, and someone empowered to decide who dies, whether that is funders, rating agencies or the tax office.
Despite coming from opposite ends of the emotional register, the two of them arrive at the same two conclusions.
The first is that organisational immortality is an accident of form, not a law of nature. Bach points out that the perpetual nonprofit - the entity assumed to live forever - is a recent invention, a structure only decades old, and asks whether we really mean to feed every organisation the nectar of the gods. This is the argument I - inspired by the writing of David Reece - have made about the language of cultural sector funding in Australia: that our verbs assume perpetuity, that we describe organisations as things that sustain and continue and grow, and that this grammar forecloses the possibility of an ending before any conversation about one can begin. Bach found the foreclosure in the legal form; I found it in the language. We passed through the same wall using different doors.
The second shared conclusion: both writers, having stared at the problem, conclude that the sector needs something it does not have: a field. Bach wants trusted advisors, transition funds, archival homes, funders who know how to help - an infrastructure of accompaniment. Smith, closing his provocation, reaches for the history of hospice, which grew out of the AIDS crisis because a generation of people needed to die well and no system existed to help them, and which was built by many hands working at once. To do the same for the arts, he says, will take a field of professionals.
What does this mean for my thinking?
REGENERATE keeps Bach's company and refuses Smith.
Bach's stewardship and Smith's selection look similar from a distance - both accept that endings are normal, both refuse the pretence of immortality - but they are born of opposite ethics. For Smith, an ending is a verdict: the organisation died because it deserved to, and the sector is healthier for the culling. For Bach, an ending is a passage: something to be accompanied well, because the harm lies not in the fact of the ending but in the loneliness and disorder of it. REGENERATE sits firmly with the second. Our claim is that churn is structurally normal and that it is not a judgement on worth - that the damage comes from the absence of pathways, not from insufficient ruthlessness.
They also differ on who decides an ending. Smith hand’s the decision upward -to funders, to metrics, to the tax office, to what he half-jokingly calls death panels. REGENERATE would build peer infrastructure so that the sector holds its own intelligence about transition, rather than having it administered from above. This is the difference between a scoreboard and a conversation. It is also why REGENERATE moves at the speed of trust and resists premature formalisation: the moment transition becomes something done to organisations by their funders, it stops being the thing the sector needs and becomes another instrument of the very frame - arts collapsed into industry, worth reduced to cost-per-outcome, scale mistaken for virtue - that got us here.
So I am grateful to Smith as an antagonist. He states, without embarrassment, the position REGENERATE exists to shift.
One caution, in passing: both writers lean on figures - survival rates, birth rates, organisational lifespans - drawn from US datasets and a particular global moment. They are illustrative but they are not Australian. The concept is relevant, the numbers are not.
A genealogy of closure
If the diagnosis is fifteen years old, and holds across four countries, and keeps being made and then set down, then diagnosis is no longer acontribution worth making. This is not something that is under-described - it is under-built. What is missing is not another eloquent account of why endings are mishandled - Bach wrote a fine one in 2009 - but the patient, unglamorous work of actually making the infrastructure that everyone who looks squarely at this problem concludes is missing.
That is REGENERATE's wager: not to be first to notice, but to be among those who finish the sentence. To do it as research and development with the sector rather than a service delivered to it. And to do it in company - because the most quietly encouraging thing about these two documents is not their argument but their existence. People have been standing where I am standing, in the US, UK and Canada, for longer than REGENERATE has had a name. We are not the first fellow travellers on this road. But we may, if we are stubborn and generous enough, be the ones who stop long enough to build.
The conversation about endings keeps ending - we need to open it again so we can do the work that will allow us to leave it behind.