Last week I went to a show of film and video works at the Parasol Unit foundation for contemporary art in North London. It prompted me to examine my feelings about such works, which seem to account for an increasing proportion of contemporary art.

Among the beautifully presented installations by Yang Fudong is a new work, No Snow on the Broken Bridge, a very slick eight-screen film in moody black and white that features young people in costume wandering about. It reminded me a bit of the 8mm films I made in my early twenties.

One of the reasons I gave up making films was because to make anything more ambitious I needed to go through the struggle of getting funding. Nowadays young film-makers can shoot a presentable movie on cheap digital equipment and edit it on a home computer. This has pluses and minuses. On the one hand we get to see very interesting movies, such as Jonathan Caouette’s memoir Tarnation, made for a few hundred dollars; on the other hand anyone who has spent his birthday money in Dixon’s can become a video artist.

Often when presented with a video installation I find myself going through a familiar cycle. First I ask myself: “Am I willing to commit time to this?” There are so many videos at some big shows that it would take days to do them all justice.

Then I try to read the faces of people emerging from the dark. Are they awestruck, amused or annoyed? I enter. Sometimes there is a bench, rarely a chair. If I don’t like a painting, after a few seconds I move on; with video I sit and wait for something good to happen, sometimes for ages. Usually I exit blinking, feeling duped. I should have learnt my lesson, but like teenagers at a disco, I hang on to the bitter end in case I miss out on an amazing experience.

Occasionally my naivety pays off. Video works I have enjoyed include Gillian Wearing’s 10-16, in which she syncs children’s voices with adults’ faces, and Mark Wallinger’s Threshold to the Kingdom, in which passengers emerge in slow motion through an airport arrivals door to heavenly music. These are short films that I would happily go to the cinema to watch. Other videos, thanks to plasma-screen technology, work as moving paintings, such as the icon-like works of Bill Viola or the time-lapse still lifes by Sam Taylor-Wood. Such quality though is as rare in video as in any other sort of art.

My video nadir occurred at the 2003 Venice Biennale. As the 40C (104F) temperature and 100 per cent humidity boiled my head and soaked my dress, my dwindling supply of patience for art in the fourth dimension melted away. My parched groans could be heard echoing round the vastness of the Arsenale each time I found myself confronted with yet another set of curtains leading to yet another oven-like room lit only by the flickering light of yet another video.

The moving image is often like an aggressive attention seeker, especially if accompanied by sound. How many painters and punters have cursed the endlessly repeating soundtrack from a video reverberating around the gallery? Maybe there is an element of envy in my attitude to video artists. They can carry an entire museum show around in their pocket on DVD. They can occupy the vast acreage of modern art galleries with a handful of pieces that sometimes look as if they have been made in an afternoon with a few friends. Shipping can be a major headache for me and it takes me a year to fill one decent-sized room.

Where I am not jealous of them is in the earning-a- living department. You have to be a top-notch video artist to make a living from it, someone whose work museums will want to buy. Video art has a very dedicated but small private- collector base.

The other downside for me would be the creeping fear that the moving image is becoming annoying. We are assaulted by audio-visual pollution on trains, in taxis, on other people’s mobile phones, on the petrol-station forecourt, on the Tube and in the pub. I expect the video T-shirt is not far away.

Videos can be moving, fascinating or hilarious. Mostly, though, I feel as though they have stolen my time.

No Snow on the Broken Bridge: Film and video installations by Yang Fudong, is at Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, N1 (020-7490 7373), until June 9