Purpose Over Perpetuity
Why the most important governance conversation in arts and culture isn't about survival.
This phrase keeps surfacing in conversations about the REGENERATE work. It's becoming shorthand for a shift the sector is ready to make - even if the systems around us aren't built for it yet.
Infrastructure endures. Institutions don't have to.
Emil Kang wrote something recently that stopped me. He draws a distinction between infrastructure and institutions - arguing that infrastructure is enduring but institutions are ephemeral. We've had it backwards. We pour our energy into preserving the institution - the board, the brand, the building - when what actually endures is the infrastructure beneath it: the relationships, the knowledge, the community trust, the purpose the institution was created to serve.
The physicist Carlo Rovelli makes a similar argument from a completely different direction. Nothing persists in a fixed state. The world is not made of things: it's made of events, of processes, of change. Stability is the illusion. Flow is the reality.
If that's true of the physical world, it's certainly true of organisations. An arts organisation is not a permanent object. It's a set of relationships, held in a particular form, for a particular time, in service of a particular purpose. When the form no longer serves the purpose, the form should be allowed to change — or to end.
Not as failure. As ecology.
Endings as compost
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass about how Indigenous ecological knowledge understands decline and decomposition as generative acts. A forest needs its fallen trees. The nutrients released by an ending are what make the next growth possible. The fallen log is not waste - it is the nursery for what comes next.
In First Nations knowledge systems here in Australia, this understanding runs even deeper: Country operates in cycles of renewal, and care for what is ending is inseparable from care for what is emerging.
In a healthy cultural ecology, the same should be true. The knowledge, relationships, community connections and artistic practice held by an organisation don't disappear when it closes. They disperse. They seed new things. But only if the ending is managed with enough care that the nutrients aren't lost in the collapse.
Stewardship. Eldership. Hospicing.
Vanessa Andreotti and Habiba Nabatu write about the work of "hospicing": developing the wisdom and presence required to accompany endings with grace, trusting that from these transitions, new life will find its way into being. Our obsession with growth, they argue, has left us unable to sit with endings. That discomfort prevents us from being fully present to what is actually happening.
A good ending invites us to let go of the compulsion to control or extend the life of things that have outlived their purpose.
That is a form of leadership. The leader who can say "this organisation's purpose may be permanent, but its current form may not be" is practising something our sector desperately needs and almost never names. It's the leadership that asks:
What has to end to make way for what is needed now - and next?
What can exist independently of us?
What would the community we serve most need if this organisation were to change form?
A governance question, not a crisis question
These questions belong on the board agenda alongside growth, not as a sign of trouble, but as a sign of maturity.
Yet the gravitational pull toward continuation is immense. No board votes to close. No artistic director raises the possibility of an ending with funders unless the situation is already desperate. Organisations represent decades of labour, identity, community relationship. Letting go of form feels like letting go of all of it.
And the urgency is real. Indy Johar argues that stabilisation, transition and reimagination -once sequential phases that unfolded over decades - now collide within the same moment. We can no longer wait for the crisis to pass before thinking about what comes next. The crisis is the next. Leaders must hold the present together while simultaneously letting go of what doesn't serve purpose and building toward what's needed. All at once.
That's exactly the position arts and cultural leaders are in right now.
Purpose over perpetuity
Perpetuity is not purpose. And an ecology that cannot let things end cannot let new things begin.
The sector is full of leaders who already know this. What they lack is the language, the peer connection, and the practical tools to act on it without doing it alone.
References
Emil Kang, "The Outcome Delusion" and related writing on infrastructure vs institutions, The Reprise, 2026.
Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (2018).
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013).
Vanessa Andreotti & Habiba Nabatu, "The Work of Hospicing," Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2025.
Indy Johar & 10x100, "When the Horizons Collapse: Resistance, Crisis, and the Deep Attractors of Tomorrow," March 2026.
Pascal Gielen, Trust: Building on the Cultural Commons (2024).