At 83, Gaetano Pesce is enjoying a late-career surge of celebrity. As the artist, designer, and architect told me poolside at the Ritz in Miami Beach on a recent humid afternoon, “When I came here three days ago, there were people stopping me on the street, recognizing me!”

Pesce, who has lived and worked in Brooklyn since 1983, was in town the week of Art Basel to present a series of chairs he designed for Bottega Veneta’s Spring-Summer 2023 show, held in Milan in September. Though responsible for more than his fair share of spectacularly collectible, surrealist furniture pieces, like the buxom “La Mamma,” an occasionally controversial armchair in the abstracted form of a woman held down by a ball and chain, Pesce is as surprised as any that he’s become one of the trendiest names in the novelty-gobbling worlds of fashion and design. (As I wrote last week in GQ’s Show Notes newsletter, Art Base has emerged as a fifth fashion week of sorts, making it a welcoming scene for a design polymath like Pesce.) “Me, I am not very good,” he said. “What is good is that the others don’t do what they are supposed to do. So the little I do becomes very important.”

Despite his elder-statesman status in a town run amok with twenty-something rising stars, Pesce retains all the zeal of his younger self: back in the mid-’60s, he penned a manifesto railing against sameness in architecture and design. When I asked him if he saw anything good that…