In For a Baroque Aesthetic, A study of the Films of David Lynch Michael Cutaya says that there may be two tendencies within the baroque, but there may also be two different points of views from which to look upon the baroque.

The different appreciations of the baroque seem to spring for a large part from the question of what is reality. The classical point of view considers the essence, the origin of things; classicism researches the truth through the perfect form. From this perspective the baroque representation, with all its artifices, excesses, decorations, trompe l'oeils and multiplied images, is necessarily superficial and false. The baroque is the art of illusions deluding the beholder away from the truth of things. Thus theorists of the 18th century, invested in classicism, found no redeeming feature in the baroque. More recently however, its very artificiality has seduced many for being more revealing of a world made of deceptive appearances. A manifesto for the neo-baroque aesthetic written by Erminia Passannanti gives a good example of this point of view:

Neo-baroque is the rediscovery, exaltation and re-evaluation of the kitsch, it is the attribution to its codes of a scheme of values, and it is indeed the re-activation of these values in the contemporaneity. It is believing in the power of the false, the artifact as being more meaningful of the true.