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For years, this specific music lovers’ lament has been leaking into a culture-wide complaint about the adverse effect of music videos on attention spans, race relations, sexuality and almost every conceivable issue related to teenage delinquency.

In the 1980s and ’90s, the restless, flickering imagery of MTV became virtually synonymous with attention deficit disorders. And the targeted bombardment of hormonally unbalanced teenage boys with a measured supply of bikini-clad babes aroused as much conservative ire as adolescent desire. But maybe it’s worth looking at the issue from another angle: from the point of view, for instance, of the art world.

Video has been prominent in contemporary art since the ’70s. Go to any biennale or big contemporary survey show and video art is accorded enormous respect. The medium has its own history, reference points and superstars. It’s obvious to any open-minded observer that some of today’s most interesting artists specialise in video. Yet even art world aficionados admit it’s still more common to come out of the darkened rooms set up to show video art feeling frustrated than genuinely enthusiastic. True, the modes of display are often natty: double or triple screens, projections on to the floor, rumbling, ominous soundtracks. But none of this can disguise that much of the work seems ill-conceived, feebly made and pathetically self-important.

Why this should be is hard to say. Video art grew to prominence in the ’70s during the heyday of minimalism, which could be part of the reason. Minimalism shunned the idea of emotional engagement in favour of a kind of lofty objectivity (at least it pretended to: the best minimalist art was hotly romantic beneath its cool exterior). The earliest video artists were tuned into minimalist tenets. They embraced the idea of detachment and repetition to a fault: think of the films of Andy Warhol or the videos of Bruce Nauman.

These artists were often inventive and occasionally even witty. But their strategies were taken up by other, less inventive artists and quickly became stodgy and predictable, with the result that, until recently, video art was automatically equated with poor production values, sophomoric ideas and soporific longueurs.

For years, aspiring video artists continued to deny themselves the artistic values their medium was so obviously equipped to handle, especially humour, narrative and emotion. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this perversely self-denying attitude is to compare video art with the best music videos of the past few decades.

In any such comparison, video artists would appear to hold all the advantages. They’re free to do as they please. The makers of music clips, by contrast, though they may have generous budgets, are effectively working with one arm tied behind their backs. The visuals they come up with have to go with a song, making theirs an ancillary art form, like set design.

Yet in recent times, even as the music industry endures a period of upheaval, the music video has proven itself an arena of surprising resilience and feverish creativity. Alongside its best creations, much of the video art celebrated in the art world looks bloodless and smug. (And, of course, with the advent of websites such as YouTube, it’s a great deal easier to sample the best music videos than navigate the obscure and mystifying world of video art.)

One of the defining characteristics of the best music videos is a sense of humour. It’s been there from the beginning. Look at classics such as the clip accompanying Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues (actually an excerpt from D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary, Don’t Look Back). Dylan stands in an alley behind the Savoy Hotel in London and, as the song unfolds, heedlessly flips cards on which random lyrics are written. (The clip inspired the series of photographs, called Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say, that shot British artist Gillian Wearing to fame in 1992.)

Often the humour in music videos is prankish and surrealistic. Consider the clip accompanying Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice, which showed the ageing but ominously handsome Christopher Walken dancing acrobatically through a hotel lobby. The video was directed by Spike Jonze, who made the feature film Being John Malkovich. Jonze is one of many music video directors who have gone on to make feature films instantly recognisable for a spirit of inventiveness imported directly from music videos. Michel Gondry is another. Gondry directed the award-winning clip accompanying Bjork’s Human Behaviour on her debut solo album. Ostensibly

a riff on Goldilocks and the three bears, it takes off in completely unexpected directions and seems most intent on illustrating the lyric: “There’s definitely definitely definitely no logic to human behaviour.”

The video won countless accolades the year it appeared and Gondry went on to make videos for some of the biggest names in the business, from the Rolling Stones and Lenny Kravitz to the Vines and the Chemical Brothers. More recently he has been making feature films (including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). But I like best his videos for the White Stripes, particularly the clip accompanying their track The Hardest Button to Button.

This video is characteristic of many recent clips that emphasise simplicity, as if seeking an antidote to the hectic barrage of images that characterised MTV in the past. It shows drums and amps multiplying with each beat of the sparsely arranged song. It’s a superb example of the way the best videos turn sound and image into a unified experience. (Video art, by contrast — when not disdainful of both — inevitably privileges visuals over sound.)

Pop songs almost always have a story to tell. It’s a huge part of their appeal and the makers of music videos haven’t been shy about augmenting it. Of course, the advantage they have over the directors of short films, which inevitably depend on lame gags conveyed through forced dialogue, is that the song does much of the narrative work for them, freeing them to be allusive and playful.

The results can be startlingly original (much more so than in video art which, until recently, generally spurned storytelling).

Think of the brilliant clip accompanying the Arctic Monkeys’ When the Sun Goes Down, a tale of prostitution and pimping in northern England. Or earlier narrative videos such as the animated clip accompanying A-Ha’s Take on Me or Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Sure, these are corny, dated and childish, but they were groundbreaking at the time and, looked at today, still seem full of the kind of esprit one often longs for in the art world.

Tied to the question of narrative, which has been fundamental to visual art for millenniums, is the no less fundamental matter of emotional engagement. For some reason this was never a priority for video artists. (Bill Viola is a rare exception.) The makers of music videos, by contrast, have never been afraid of it. Who will forget the simplicity and emotional force of Sinead O’Connor singing Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U straight to camera in 1990? Or the gorgeous, nostalgia-infused visuals accompanying Silverchair’s After All These Years, with its hand-held camerawork, blurry sunspots and backlit scenes from a long-ago road trip?

More recently, there was the amazing spectacle of a video made to go with a song by Sick Puppies. (It was created independently of the band and posted on YouTube.)

The set-up was facile: a man holding up a sign saying Free Hugs in Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall. The resulting video was one of the funniest and most poignant in recent memory, and a worldwide hit on YouTube.

But even when the music is about detachment and numbness — as a lot of great recent music is — music video makers find ways of matching this with visuals that have emotional force. One thinks of the visuals accompanying Radiohead songs such as Bulletproof, which uses the most rudimentary form of animation; or the short animations known as blips, inspired by Stanley Donwood’s artwork, accompanying tracks from the same band’s Kid A (especially good is the blip for Motion Picture Soundtrack).

I think contemporary video artists are increasingly opening themselves to the inventiveness and originality of music videos. They are becoming more interested in storytelling and less afraid of emotional subject matter. There are many examples, but Finland’s Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Germany’s Candice Breitz spring to mind.

Recent years have seen the boundaries between the two fields blurring. Doug Aitken, for instance, a superstar of contemporary video art, has used Andre Benjamin, from the rap group Outkast, in one of his multi-screen video installations. And Matthew Barney, perhaps the most ambitious video artist of all, has teamed up with his wife Bjork on projects that not only advance his own highly evolved concerns but seem like a natural extension of Bjork’s radical visual style, as seen in her music videos.

It may be that, despite a recent revival, the golden era of music videos is over. MTV, still the field’s most powerful arbiter, devotes less airtime to playing videos, preferring more traditional television shows. Record companies are still throwing millions of dollars into making music videos — their biggest stars demand it — but most of it is wasted money, since an ever-diminishing number of videos make it on to MTV’s high-rotation playlists. Whether YouTube will take up the slack remains to be seen, but it’s starting to happen as stars such as Lil Wayne release videos straight to the internet.

What’s my favourite music video? Without question, the clip accompanying Outkast’s 2003 hit Hey Ya!. It’s a spoof of the Beatles’ 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in which lead singer Benjamin plays all the characters in the band, from the snarling, sexed-up drummer to the shyly smiling guitarist and the back-up singers dressed hilariously in jockey silks. It’s not deep, it’s not arty, it’s just sublimely funny, sexy, and jubilant. Call me shallow, but I never tire of watching it.