People seem to like this. Traditionally, a museum allows between one and three minutes per exhibit in calculating audience flow. We have upped this to five minutes. From our collective curatorial experience, we know that even this is a radical underestimate of the time people will wish to spend with each exhibit. As stated above, you have to look at the context, means, and infrastructure in which the work exists, and what choices the artist made.
Contemporary artists are very literate regarding media institutions.
They are concerned less with the materiality of what they make or the skills base they employ, and more with the manipulation of such things as context. Similarly, when an artist produces work for a museum context, the idea of the museum as an institution becomes the medium. In this sense, today's artists are making entire disciplines their media. An artist who chooses to make a theatrical work, to be experienced in a theater, will use as the medium the entire notion of theater, in terms of both its processes and its social role. Again, see all of the above.