“In our daily experience, few things are as emotionally devastating as being put on hold, trying to resolve some problem.”

That’s a quote from a Brooklyn curator, Colby Chamberlain, and I nominate it for the thought of the day. Or decade! Or maybe it should be chiseled on the Statue of Bureaucracy — a giant lady we’d erect in the harbor after years of fruitless redesigns and cost overruns. Instead of a torch, she’d be holding up a phone blaring, “Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold.”

With her other arm, of course, the statue would be clutching a stack of forms. And it is those endless forms we sign every day, from 30-year mortgages to Duane Reade “loyalty” cards (just how loyal are you to your drugstore?), that inspired Mr. Chamberlain to mount his new exhibit, “The Dotted Line.”

Yes. We’re talking about an exhibit of works on paper devoted to paperwork, on display at Brooklyn’s Rotunda Gallery through December 21.

“These artists are trying to get past the default line of ‘Kafkaesque,'” Mr. Chamberlain said, pointing to a room full of fake ID cards, legal name change forms, and philosophically rewritten 1040 questions.

While bureaucracy can be infuriating or depressing — or both, if you’re dealing with the Department of Education — this art is anything but. Consider the credit card statements painstakingly handwritten by artist Kate Bingaman-Burt:

“Chase, $834.54 due. Minimum payment: $16.00. Effective APR, 16.74.” (Shame on Chase, by the way. That’s darn high.)

Ms. Bingaman-Burt sells these works, copied down to the last digit from her own depressing statements, for the minimum payment due each month. In this way, her art is literally paying the bills. How many other artists can say that? (She’s already paid off two of her six cards in full.)

Then there’s multimedia artist Eric Doeringer. He makes fake employee identification cards for fictitious museums. For $200, you can get a laminated card with your photo on it that looks for all the world as if you work in, say, the education department of the (nonexistent) Kincaid Museum. And did you know that most museums let employees from other museums get in free?

Mr. Doeringer’s point — I think — is that art should be free to everyone. Or else it’s that, even post-September 11, 2001 we still trust official-looking IDs way too much. (Governor Spitzer, take note.)

Michael Rakowitz’s art looks more like a business school case study. It documents the difficulty of importing dates from Iraq — the art project he dreamed up. He’s got photos of the dates being harvested, stamped export forms, and the whole paper trail you’d keep if you were actually starting a (lousy) business. It’s a government-damning piece, since snafus kept some of the dates stuck so long in such a hot truck that eventually they rotted. He’s got pictures of that, too.

But that’s just it: If you can make great art of the rape of the Sabine women, or John the Baptist’s head on a platter, shouldn’t modern-day artists be making art out of the great miseries befalling us now? “The Lost Law School Applications of the Sabine Women,” maybe? Or “John From Accounting Whose Head Should Be on a Platter Because He Didn’t Get the Taxes Out on Time”?

Just because a problem is pernicious and petty doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of artistic attention. And if art can change society, let’s get cracking.

And yet, as deeply as these artists deconstruct this issue, they do seem at least as flummoxed as the rest of us. When they were mailed the official forms to authorize inclusion of their works in this show, Mr. Chamberlain said, “They were a little slow getting them in.”

Guess they had something better to do with their time. As do we all.

lskenazy@yahoo.com