Easily the most powerful contemporary art exhibit in New York right now, The New Museum's "Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection" investigates the metaphorical potential of surface with an emphasis on work trafficking in the body and its functions--sexual, eliminatory, and otherwise. In an investigation that extends concerns central to his own work, Jeff Koons, curator of the exhibit, locates the richly-signifying corporeal facade in a range of art, tending towards the sculptural. Selections include Urs Fischer's momento-mori wax odalisque, Kara Walker's lascivious sepias, Kiki Smith's intestinal cast and auto-fellating/auto-nursing Adam-and-Eve-esque pair, David Altmejd's nude colossus, and Terence Koh's twin towers of white chocolate (say thank you Janine Antoni), the last of which, in retrospect, call up the bird-shit surfaces of Dan Colen's paintings.  Colen himself is represented by his tagged, chewing-gum monolith, which sits on a stack of burkas, a base that produces new associations under the titular heading, "Skin Fruit." In large-part because of the blue-chip status of much of the work in a space presumably devoted to art in its earlier stages of cultural acceptance, attacks on the show have been chronic, servere, and various in form, centered around the semi-ethical question of the Greek Cypriot industrialist Joannou's museum-trustee status as a possible complication to the curated exhibition of his collection. The sentiments of Roberta Smith's bitter NYTimes lambast echoed across the Bowery in a DIY poster in which the museum is wrapped in the skin of Joannou's Koons-designed yacht (bottom photo in the Muse post, Art Car), titled "Anti-Establishment" with a strike through "anti." Indeed, the institution itself appears to be doing the "Boho Dance" (to borrow Tom Wolfe's terms from The Painted Word) in transparent fashion. We've already seen the museum's curatorial process for "Younger than Jesus" put on display like the pipes of the Pompidou. We've also seen Massimiliano and Ali literally in bed with Maurizio.  Should we, for some reason, demand the connections that hold an institution together be better hidden from view? Barbara Kruger redux 2010: Cronyism in the art world should come as no surprise.  We need not expect the art-world's Platonic ideal of a meritocracy to be more than an alibi in reality, particularly when the result is meritorious.  A few works in "Skin Fruit" miss the mark--for example, Tauba Auerbach's now-ubiquitous neo-Op paintings (which worked well in solo view at Deitch earlier this year), are problematic within such a bodily-oriented show; Cattlelan's Christian-Lemmerz-like Carrara-marble All is a trite take on war (which subject is otherwise largely absent from the show)--but in the presence of the worst Biennial in recent memory, and maybe worse, a "Brucennial" (it's hard to even type it), there is no need to make such a fuss over a museum curating from a trustee's collection.  If Roberta Smith looked carefully, she might find art-world cronyism quite closer to home.