It was a self-confessed attempt to

Does "it was a self-confessed attempt to" in the following context mean:

1. As Kaye himself confessed once, it was an attempt to

or

2. it was a self-expressive attempt (a show off) to?

Context:

A similar, although better tolerated, example is Roger, a living artwork who ‘exhibited’ outside the Millbank Tate Gallery in London in the mid to late 1990s. Again, it is easy to be cynical about the sort of gesture that Kaye was making by taking a homeless man from the streets and turning him into a sort of sideshow, not only because it was a self-confessed attempt to steal some limelight and further Kaye’s artistic career, but also because patronage seemed, in this case, to verge on patronisation and exploitation.