The label "Frank Barknecht" hathe been affixed to this message,
But is my impression correct, that media art isn't really sold, but more done for hire? Like, some institue comes along and tells someone: Please make us an impressive installation, and we pay you.
Lots of stuff gets sold. A lot of us do commission stuff. Ideally, you don't do commissioned stuff and have the luxury of doing whatever you want and getting paid for it. I know it doesn't work this way for most bands, most artists make "bread and butter" cash from commissions, etc...
The reason I said, previously, that "I'm not sure your projects mean diddly-squat" is because, for the most part, this whole thing is about money and contacts. If you meet the right people and have the cash... you can go pretty far with relatively little talent... Pay the best engineers, buy the right songs... pay the right people to say the right things about you and you've got it made. {If they say the right things for free... you're doing even better. If they mean it you're making art...}
Much of this is changing now that we have the net and getting published is no longer a huge problem... Still, folk don't have the time to research every artist out there. Most folk are still reliant on word of mouth and criticts to tell them where to point their browser. The more folk pointing browsers your way... the better you're going to do. {This assumes a reasonable level of quality, which, given what digital tools are capable of... is not all that difficult to achieve.}
At a real, artistic level... I think the work is the only thing that matters... I think that those of us that are serious are interested in success at that level more than any other. I doubt any of us is averse to getting rich though...
You write software... Ideally, I'm sure you want to turn out exceptional work at an exceptional price, get recognized, get rich, make great innovations, etc, etc...
...At 4 in the morning, when you're trying to get the "megawatt gizmo" to make megawatt gizmo sounds and stop putting out sludge when you turn the knob past 2.5... I doubt any of the above matters.
This wouldn't be that much different from the way, some open source software developers earn their money. You gain reputation while working on, say, the Apache webserver and then someone, who needs to setup a customized webserver, asks you to do that, for money.
{It would seem I've gotten off track. :}}