Despite that the histories of modern and contemporary art have in many spaces and moments coincided with bureaucracy in numerous ways and from different angles, with the exception of the flourish of scholarship on the “archival impulse”, bureaucracy—literally the dominion of that most functional piece of office furniture—has been excluded from the analysis of modern and contemporary art. This project engages those practices that investigate, thematize or interface in some way with existent bureaucracies and their logics, with an interest to not take those artists who engage with bureaucracy (nor bureaucrats themselves) at their word, but rather to investigate how their works exist in practice, and within social space. By developing what I am here calling a bureaucratic aesthetics, this project, through three in-depth case analyses, seeks to investigate whether works of art that address bureaucracy have the potential to disrupt the institutions they critique, or whether they instead reproduce and reinforce bureaucratic logics—and bureaucratic claims to legitimacy—within their creative and artistic fields.