From William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003):

‘How do you think we’ll look,’ Bigend asks, ‘to the future?’
[…]
‘They won’t think of us,’ Cayce says … ‘Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don’t mean the icons, but the ordinary actual living souls.’
‘I think they’ll hate us,’ says Helena.
‘Souls,’ repeats Bignend. […] ‘Souls?’
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, on in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.’
‘Do we have a past then?’ Stonestreet asks.
‘History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when,’ Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. ‘Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct.’
‘The future is there,’ Cayce hers herself say, ‘looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.’
‘You sound oracular.’
‘I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem very relevant.’ (pages 57-59)

[…]

‘Have you seen the guerrilla re-edit of the most recent Lucas? [Star Wars Ep I] […] They seem particularly to pick on him. One day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even classic films. Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s a though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else. (page 70)

From Lytton Strachey’s Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918):

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

From my Michael Jackson Project image (2003):

I want this painting to be in the AGO in 2116. I want kids on art school trips at the gallery to be bored while the underpaid instructor explains that a hundred years ago there lived this freak who commissioned a painting of himself surrounded by cherubs. She will say, ‘He had delusions of godlihood.’ Maybe she’ll even use big words with the kids, and say, ‘He aspired to an apotheosis in both physical and the musical forms’.Some might be interested, and they will go home and download Billy Jean and Thriller and watch the quaint 20th Century music videos and think, Thank God I didn’t live back then!

As interested as we are in mad Caligula, or the incestuous Lord Byron, most will go to their soy milk and cookies and not give a shit.