Artistic fashions/trends as a whole

I really have never understood movements especially from the inside out. From the outside, they can be greatly entertaining. Not so much if one has to or feels forced to participate to be legitimate. For the growth of an art, the last thing that is needed is everyone investigating the same idea, and even more so for so long. Imagine all the poets in the world congregated at the same bluff and each writing poem after poem about the landscape. Sure a few would bring something unique. It does seem though a bad idea considering all the other bluffs in the world that are being ignored because of this. More often the bluff seems arbitrary if not shallow and/or a trivial choice. We find little out about a forest by everyone taking the same path in. How many pictures on flicker are needed from the same spot. Such situations resemble prisons.
It is not a matter of individual ego. It is just more expedient to have many people investigating many different branches that the present has unveiled. Some will naturally find themselves drawn to some like areas but not everyone in a niche and/or its pseudo-opposite. The more paths taken seems the best way for a whole art to grow wider, if not also upward.