Vonnegut & Transitional Whys

I started the day early, before 0500, thinking about the passing of a common literature in English, no doubt provoked by the death of Kurt Vonnegut and a column written by a friend on that subject. After reading today's Bleat by James Lileks, and reading the part on the Minneapolis Public Library, I decided there must be something teleological in the air, to be reflecting on the ends of things. All in all, though, it's probably just a result of my acquiring and re-reading Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New, a survey of modern art that I find nearly indispensable. I didn't care for most modern art before I read it, and don't now, but at least I can now comprehend it, and why it has reached its dry, abstract end, whether embodied in the Kandinskys and Klees and all their ilk in hundreds of museums and galleries around the planet, or in such mausoleums of urbanity as Albany's Empire State Plaza. Look at it, and see a representative government achieve what Mussolini could only dream of, and remember that somebody thought that this pile was actually architecture. What derailed all the paradigms between 1850 - 1950? Why is it perhaps important that these things happen? I wish I knew, or perhaps I don't......