In short, they lacked an aura associated with Judd – whatever that might be. In deciphering Walter Benjamin’s thoughts, Maggie Iversen astutely positions the dilemma in light of a world in which the ‘desire for auratic, aesthetic experience is always threatening to collapse into the copy and the commodity’. She concludes, ‘The difficult task of the museum is to conserve the work of art and where necessary even replicate it while protecting its vulnerable aura.’ Therein lays the problem. The replica by its very nature is not (to use words uttered in this workshop) ‘original’, ‘free’, ‘imperfect energy’. Yet, to be convincing, it must have punch – aura. Are these requirements not inherently contradictory?