What has been seen, the saying goes, cannot be unseen, and for Indecline, a self-professed “anarchist art collective”, that was surely the point: on Thursday, the group installed five life-size effigies of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, in five cities across the US that left nothing to the imagination.

If you have none yourself, the title helped you out. The Emperor Has No Balls, the group gleefully dubbed it, stealth-installing duplicates of the naked Trump in New York, San Francisco, Cleveland, Seattle and Los Angeles. Each lasted barely an hour before being removed, but in an era where viral image-sharing precludes the fact of actually being there, that was more than long enough. The thousands of naked Trump selfies pinging around the social mediasphere made avoiding the gruesome spectacle impossible. Naked Trump is a part of us now, a perpetual presence forever an ill-fated Google image search away.

So now, inevitably, we’re left with the fallout – to parse meaning from the gesture, to clear smoke from the explosion and look for the fire. There’s an easy defence here, of course, if you care to seat No Balls (I’ll use the abbreviated version, if I may) in the time-honoured tradition of ghastly political satire.

Depending on how far back you want to go, using images where words would be seen as too crass or literal (or actionable) is a time-honoured tradition that stretches back to the Renaissance. Da Vinci’s array of grotesque little heads, the hellish fantasy landscapes of Dutch masters Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which they peopled with every manner of grotesquely distorted, hybrid creature, are proto-examples of conscious social critique through art, while Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are embedded with cheeky in-jokes aimed at the ruling papal class. In Spain, Diego Velazquez, revered as he was as the official court painter of King Philip IV, was a sly subversive, mocking his masters as they imagined him capturing their glory.

No Balls, of course, engages in no such subtleties, so let’s push aside the notion of it as art straight off. It’s more in the company of the evolving gutter press of 18th-century England, unique in Europe for having no censorship laws, where the penny press made its fortune on the ribald caricatures of the powerful. (One famous image, from 1740, of an outsize Prime Minister Robert Walpole bent over, trousers down, his giant buttocks gleaming, seems an historical confrere to Indecline’s action this week.)

Indeed, No Balls has little affinity with great political art, past or present. One of the most powerful critiques of American policy I’ve seen in recent years came from the American duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, who represented the US at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The duo – known, though not well – looked to represent the ardor of their times: using gymnastic routines performed atop an actual 52-ton tank, it conflated militarism and athletics, perhaps America’s best-known exports, within the bounds of sharp political satire (that its nonstop clanking echoed throughout the grounds of the gentle Giardini captured another American hallmark: loudness).

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s tank treadmill

So where, in the great pantheon of such things, does No Balls sit? Not very high, and for a variety of reasons. Even to take the measure of great caricature, which relies on grotesque hyperbole to prove a point, it falls, if you’ll pardon the pun, a little short.

While it receives full marks for its nominal conceit – hubris, which Trump quite clearly has in no slight supply, has prompted many a leader to lionize themselves in sculptural form – the stunted member of Trump’s anatomy to which the sculpture means to draw our attention is its undoing.

Idol-Worship or the way to preferment, a satire on Walpole. Photograph: British Museum

Emasculation, one can fairly say, is the least notable of Trump’s many shortcomings. No balls? For what presidential candidate in recent memory could that be further from the truth? This is the man who pondered openly how shooting someone on Fifth Avenue might help him poll better. Whatever Trump’s anatomical shortfalls, this is clearly not one of them, and the piece weakens itself with a contradiction to pitch a sophomoric joke. (For what it’s worth, a recent mural of Trump’s nemesis, Hillary Clinton, appeared on a wall in Australia in much the same fashion; the candidate was portrayed as busty, bikini-clad and dripping $100 bills. The cash we can understand, but the body? Like Trump, the tasteless non-sequitur is undone not by its lack of taste, but its lack of point.)

Speaking of anatomy – mercifully, in a general sense this time – there’s an argument to be made that, for Trump, given his own lack of boundaries, none should apply. But No Balls crosses, perhaps unintentionally, into territory that serves to undermine whatever message it may mean to carry. The piece, with its slumpy, distended belly, withered buttocks and sagging pectorals, crosses callously into generalized ageism and body-shaming; unlike the attempted caricaturization of Trump’s particular bits, this is no joke, but rather an expression of unmitigated contempt, and whatever else it does, it dissolves satirical intent in an instant.

There are some that may say, in an age of Kardashians, Jenners and Cyruses, that no such rules apply, but I don’t think so. Whomever one is talking about, shaming his or her physical self is worse than cruelty for its own sake (though it is that): it’s irrelevant.

The group has made clever interventions in the past – replacing the names of stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame with the names of black men killed by police was a tightly bundled critique of the media and society’s rabidly misplaced attentions – but here, intended satire gives way to blind hatred that obscures their intent. And there’s nothing funny about that.