Time & Perspective Quote by Alvin Ailey

Art, here, isn’t romanticized as pure inspiration; it’s treated like a job threatened by paperwork. When Alvin Ailey says “We still spend more time chasing funds than we do in the studio,” he’s not just venting about budgets. He’s naming a structural humiliation: the people trained to move, imagine, and rehearse are forced to become full-time petitioners. The word “chasing” matters. It suggests motion without artistry, a frantic kind of running that produces nothing onstage. In a field built on disciplined physical time, the theft is literal.

Ailey’s intent is bluntly practical and quietly political. As a Black choreographer building an institution in mid-20th-century America, he understood that acclaim doesn’t equal stability, and that “prestige” can coexist with scarcity. The subtext is that cultural gatekeepers love the product of dance but underwrite it reluctantly, making artists repeatedly prove their worth in grant language, donor salons, and fundraising circuits. Creativity becomes conditional: you can make work, but only after you’ve performed competence for people who may not understand the work at all.

The line also works as a critique of how society measures value. Funders reward narratives, metrics, and branding; studios reward risk, failure, repetition. Ailey compresses that mismatch into a single imbalance of hours. It’s a warning that when the economics of survival dominate the calendar, the art doesn’t just get less time - it gets reshaped to fit what money can recognize.