"When they go low, we go high," said First Lady Michelle Obama in an eloquent speech at this July's Democratic National Convention. She was anonymously alluding to the tendency of Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump to make dirty jabs at minority groups and his political opponents.

Yesterday, however, some opponents of Donald Trump decided to "go low" with him when they propped up a statues of his naked body in Union Square in New York City as well as several other public locations throughout the country. Though funny and harmless at first glimpse, perhaps, a deeper analysis reveals that the creation of this statue is offensive and hurtful. I am no Donald Trump fan by any stretch of the imagination, there are several reasons why this "art" piece should never have been made in the fashion that it was.

This piece was created by an anarchist collective called INDECLINE who have said in a statement that this statue was meant to mirror the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale "The Emperor's New Clothes,” in which, of course, the Emperor is fooled into not wearing any clothes at all. By stripping "Emperor" Trump of his clothing, the group wanted to depict The Donald in his most vulnerable state: nakedness. However, there were several issues with how INDECLINE went about doing this.

Let's start with the proportions in which this statue is created. It is clear that by looking at the chest and stomach of the statue that the artists greatly exaggerated Donald Trump's weight and size. Throughout history, in political cartoons, caricatures, magazine covers, and the like, greed and corruption are often depicted as bulbous and morbidly obese figures. These images are present in film and literature as well - for example, in the beloved though not unproblematic Harry Potter series,Harry's cousin Dudley, the poster boy for spoiled and materialistic children, is described as so fat he is "wider than he was tall.” In the Star Wars film franchise, the villainous and corrupt gangster Jabba the Hutt is depicted as a grossly obese monster who is nothing but rolls of flesh and a face. Throughout Western society, fatness is nearly always associated with evil, excessive wealth, and especially greed. By inflating the proportions of Donald Trump's body, these artists contribute to a culture that is unaccepting of and discriminatory towards different or larger body types.

Next, let's focus on the title of this project: "The Emperor Has No Balls.” And he doesn't: this sculpture of a nude Trump shows him with an impossibly small penis and, quite literally, no balls. In a society that still, for some reason or another, continues to tie a person's masculinity or gender expression to their appearance and genitals, this piece is not clever or unique by choosing to omit parts of the male reproductive system, it's just another cog in a machine of toxic masculinity. Not to mention that by insinuating a lack of male genitalia = a lack of authority and other stereotypically "masculine" traits, this piece is alienating towards intersex people and Trans men.

I am all for using art as a way to protest things that we think are not right. I think that Spencer Tunick's naked photoshoot outside of the RNC this year was brilliant. I think that street artist Lushux choosing to alter his"Hillary Clinton in a Bikini" piece by covering her in a burqa to protest Islamophobia was brilliant. However, "The Emperor Has No Balls" fell short. Though maybe a good idea in concept, there were just too many things wrong with this project for it to be, at least in my eyes, a real and effective piece of artistic protest.