Avant-garde art has reached a paradoxical situation: it has become accepted by the bourgeoisie. Though professedly anti-traditional from the beginning, it built up a tradition of its own; an aesthetic and morality of uncompromising permanent revolution. The containment of the avant-garde, which began during the 1950s and has been one of the most interesting social developments in art, broke the continuity of more than one and a half centuries of non-conformism and rebellion.