Last week, I took my nine-year-old goddaughter to the de Young museum to see the museum’s current headliner: glass artist Dale Chihuly. For weeks, visitors have been lining up to see the candy-colored creations: giant balls in a boat; long thin tapers of lavender glass; dribbly chandeliers; fantastic disks resembling umbrellas or the undersides of jellyfish. Since opening in mid-June, the show is a hit.

I was excited to see the exhibit, to spend the afternoon with my goddaughter. I remembered how special it felt, when I was a nine-year-old girl, to be taken on outings by a grown-up friend. Clare is the middle child; I am about to send my teenager off to college. Plus, I enjoy her company, her way of looking at the world. And then there’s the vow I made, when she was six weeks old, “to help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ.” We can be partners in wonder.

I’d first seen Chihuly’s work a few years ago at the New York Botanical Garden. It was a glorious fall day, and I was in a state of mind to be captivated. I fell in love with the playfulness of the glass baubles floating among the lily pads; I clapped in glee at the tall-as-the-atrium glass creations alongside the desert cacti; I smiled at the faces of others as they, too, took in the beauty around us. The running children; the old white woman in a wheelchair and her young Haitian attendant grinning at one another; the families wearing tank tops and flip flops and speaking Spanish; the Hasidic couple in long curls (his) and wig (hers): everyone was out on a glorious October Sunday and loving what they saw.

So, why, last Thursday as I walked with Clare into the dark galleries to push the button on our shared audio guide and hear that Chihuly based his glass “baskets” on his collection of real Native American baskets from the Northwest, was I left so cold? Why did the huge glass balls that had so charmed me floating among the lilies lose all their whimsy in a backlit boat on a museum dais? Why did the colors and shapes that thrilled me that late afternoon in the Bronx leave me, in a museum with my goddaughter in my hometown, cold?

Oh, it was pretty. Especially the room with the glass ceiling through which we looked up at the undersides of thousands of pieces, lighted up like a kaleidoscope. But I kept thinking of a review I’d read some months before, by Kenneth Baker, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, in which he deemed the show “empty virtuosity.” What had been alive in a garden in NYC felt euthanized in a museum in San Francisco. The reason, for me, had to do with what the trappings of a museum imply about a work: meaning, depth, engagement with ideas. Exactly what those very trappings made explicitly clear were lacking. Without those trappings, at the NYBG, no one felt cheated.

There’s no doubt Chihuly’s work demands a creative and complex vision as well as tremendous technical skill. But displaying it in the darkened hush of a museum attributes to the pieces a power that succeeds only in showing their, well, empty virtuosity. The whole reason they were so much fun in the Botanical Gardens was that they weren’t pretending to be “about” anything. They just looked cool and made us all smile.

A week after going to see Chihuly with Clare, I went back alone to the de Young to see Jane Hammond: Paper Work, an exhibit that was everything Chihuly wasn’t. Uncrowded, unpublicized, tucked away at the back of the building. And about something: these images, according to the placard on the wall, “explore context and meaning while creating complex combinations of images that enhance the sculptural quality of the work.”

“My Heavens,” as intensely detailed as any medieval map of the skies, uses collage to fasten the artist’s personal constellation of a tiger and a whale, a man in a boat and a ballerina. We might not “get” all the allusions, but we recognize them as full of meaning as well as visual delight.

I left the gallery that day as buoyed by Hammond’s work as I’d been by Chihuly’s in the NYBG. It made me smile, and made me think. I recalled how, upon leaving the Chihuly exhibit, Clare had pointed out the one Chihuly sculpture placed outside the de Young—a tall yellow tangle of a tower next to a pond—and we’d agreed it looked best because it was outside.

In a few weeks the Academy of Sciences—home to a T Rex skeleton, myriad beetles on pins, the nation’s largest reef aquarium, and alligators—will re-open. I’ll be taking Clare. I can’t wait.