Aura Dies Hard (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy) joins the artist after having just returned from a museum survey exhibition of video art. Through the course of the following video essay, the artist reflects on the rhetoric of "dematerialization" often linked with early video (and conceptual and performance art more generally). Proposing an alternative, "materialist" read, in which the (often unauthorized) duplication and circulation of artist video paradoxically help perpetuate its mythic beginnings, the artist ultimately reveals that copying technologies and art world protocol have made it possible for him to obtain all the videos encountered at the museum show, clips of which are played throughout the narration.