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I’ve had to turn down an invitation to the Manchester Festival. Had I gone, I would have been sure to see Jeremy Deller’s Procession. I met Deller once and he didn’t come across as a bit of a tit (sample interaction: JD pauses to check hair and make-up before getting into lift). But he’s a bloody good artist.

The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone had an interesting interview with Deller last week – sample quote: another day, another cravat – which raised the issue of confidence:

Jeremy Deller can’t draw, can’t paint, can’t sculpt, can’t do any of the things we traditionally associate with artists; but I have rarely met somebody so confident in his status as an artist.

I posted on the weekend about the uncertain relationship between confidence and achievement and this is more evidence of that uncertainty. It also hints at a reason for confidence’s modern prominence.

The shift in art – from technical skill to “art of ideas”, from Valezquez to Warhol (whom Deller describes as the most important artist of the last 200 years) – is symptomatic of a wider shift in Western society. So many things now are more a question of perception than they are of reality, to use an unavoidable false dichotomy. Even international diplomacy, long seen by philosophers as the ultimate realm of conflict and aggression, has become all about the “optics”, as the current vogue for soft power demonstrates. We can see this shift in Deller’s art, which includes ordinary people and seeks overtly to question the boundaries of traditional art.

Confidence is an unreal thing with very real consequences. It lies at the core of all soft power, because it has the power to shift perceptions. So as the world becomes more unreal – more Warhol-esque, one could say – confidence is bound to become more and more important. People might even end up fighting wars over it. Oh – they already have.