Well, I guess I disagree with everybody.
I think Rob C was overly harsh in his evaluation of Alain's early years, inasmuch as Alain was working in a shared darkroom in which he didn't even have the usual membership privileges, complicated by the fact that he was just learning (in a student darkroom) and might not even have known about amber safelights. If they had a red safelight, they had a red safelight. Suck it up.
I also disagree with everybody who refused to do any work that didn't appeal -- i.e. refused to work for the money. I've found over a lifetime that you learn more by doing work that you don't want to do, than by doing work that you do want to do, whether or not money is involved. The Japanese produce some of the most skilled artists in the world, and the Japanese attitude toward learning can be summed up by, "Shut up and do what you're told." At some point, you may or may not reach mastery, depending on your drive and talent, but in any case, you spend a lot of time doing things you don't want to do, because doing what you want to do is easy. You do it because you can already do it, and that basically teaches you to do things the easy way.You never have the insights that derive from doing something you don't want to do, and then applying those insights to things that you do want to do.
As far as Alain's essay goes, I don't think that collecting art is particularly important. I think it's nice. It's like wall paper. Wallpaper is nice, at least sometimes. The art that most of us could afford to collect is generally crappy, and if you spend too much time looking at crappy art, you'll probably wind up making crappy art, because you'll find yourself accepting the cliches and faults that are found in crappy art. (I live in Santa Fe, a sinkhole of crappy art -- though there is a bit of decent art here. Not much, but a bit.) In any case, I'm on Santa Fe's Canyon Road almost daily, and believe me, the art sucks, but people collect it anyway. I don't see how that can be good. What is important is looking at a lot of really good art, usually found in museums. If I lived in NYC, I'd be at the Met or MOMA every friggin' day. I go to NY twice a year, and every trip, I visit the Pieter Bruegel at the Met, as well as a few others, and I see new things in them every time. The recent "Max Beckmann in New York" blew my socks off. Crappy art doesn't do that. Your socks stay on but your skin crawls.
I disagree with whoever said that he didn't really think of photography as art. I think it is, and a high form of art, and it's about the only art that is still affordable. I have a fine print of Paul Caponigro's Running White Deer on my bedroom wall and I look at it every day. I believe I paid $6,000 for it. Worth every penny. What you can't do is confuse that fact that photography is easy and cheap, with the idea that photographic masterpieces are easy. They're as hard and rare as masterpieces in any other art form. Ansel Adams devoted most of his life to photography, and is considered a great talent, yet how many genuine masterpieces did he produce in that lifetime? Maybe a dozen?
My biggest problem with all of Alain's essays is, it seems to me, is that he particularly appreciates things that sell, which is a requirement of his particularly difficult way of making a living. Because of my job, I recognize and appreciate that, but that mindset has a distorting effect on the way you value things. The question is -- which perhaps none of us can answer, maybe not even Alain -- does he collect art that's really good, or does he collect "art" that he simply appreciates because it appeals to the same set of problems and artistic decisions he has to make as a person who is fundamentally a commercial artist? Does that art say something important about the world, or does it say something about what tourists like and will buy? That is, ids it, or is it not, wallpaper?