When Does Pluralism End? Or Does It?

I was asked to discuss what trends I see coming in the near future for art recently. This question is asked quite often (at least much more frequently than trends actually change, IMO, but...). So I thought about it a while (as long as my ADD-riddled mind would permit) and came up with a few things that I wish would change, but don't know actually. Here's what I'd love to say:

It really feels as if we're on the verge of seeing the dust settle. As if Pluaralism has run its course and clearer trends, if not camps, are set to emerge. It most likely won't include a new age of manifesto-driven "-isms," per se, but there will be a consolidation of conclusions.

But there's a tiny voice in my head saying that's a bunch of crap (it's a particularly rude voice, but it may just be right).

The metaphor I've found helpful in discussing my opinion on Pluralism is to imagine that the widespread efforts in Deconstruction resulted in a vast landscape scattered with very small pieces of artstuff (imagine little building blocks as far as the eye can see). Some artists entered that landscape and got busy trying to breaking down the artstuff further, into smaller and smaller pieces, but some artists, because this is the inclination of artists, couldn't help themselves and began taking the small blocks and constructing things out of them. This new construction was informed by the previous deconstruction (i.e., they could see what each block signified once broken down), but as daunting as building some new "thing" from that landscape might seem, some artists simply had to. The result was an army of highly individualistic, often highly private, efforts...their own, often very elaborate, universes.

Stretching the metaphor a bit, and superimposing it on what we know about the dawn of civilizations---where towns emerged and then adventurous sorts set out to explore the wilderness, only to run into another previously unknown town where they did many things in the same way, but many things were different, and they took what was different, or at least what was better, back to their town to improve things there, bringing the two towns closer together in how they do things---it's easy to imagine that artists building their own private Idahos would eventually "borrow" from other private Idahos (am I using that right? it's too early to tell...perhaps I should stick with "private universes"), bringing them closer together in how they do things, and voila, a trend emerges.

Or does it? Is there now a built-in resistance to letting that happen? I know anyone stepping forward with a manifesto would likely be mocked right out of Chelsea, but there do seem to be many more art collectives making waves than a decade ago. Can an "ism" be far behind?