Does iTunes 11 spell death for the album cover?

Question

Letter To Apple, From A Music Nerd. 
iTunes 11 offers many visual interface innovations, however there is one drastic omission: the ability to display Album Artwork at a large size... (previously one could scale the art in "Cover Flow", or view the artwork in Full Screen size mode).
Apple has now robbed us of our ability to enjoy the detailed and creative world of album covers. In the age of high-res Retina displays, this is a step backwards. Such an iconic form of cultural artistry should not be confined to medium/small thumbnails. 
Apple built a reputation as a computer for creative minds -- and this change is a slap in the face to musicians, photographers, artists, designers, and fans who have poured considerable amounts of time and money into these artworks.
The fix is simple: reinstate the "view full screen option", and add a slidable view so one can increase artwork within the browser to a large size.
Until then I am reverting to my old iTunes, and looking to other media players for innovation in the way we experience music.
Disappointingly yours,
Jeff Harris
Toronto, ON
Send iTunes your feedback!
http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Answer 1

Absolutely agree with your point on resizable artwork. I also hate the automatically generated thumbnails; they're extremely low quality and therefore look blurry. If they at least used a bigger image that then resized to the size the thumbnails are now, it would look better already.
The "use custom colors for open albums" option also butchers the album artwork by blurring the edges, thereby cutting of heads and text and generally making it look like a 12-year-old's first Photoshop project.
The album art player Varjak refers to is a feature that was already present in iTunes 10. It has minimal functionality though and launches an extra window, when what most album art lovers will want is a hi-res image in the iTunes window itself.
Since the left column where album art was displayed in iTunes 10 is probably not coming back, the best solution would indeed be to re-introduce the size slider, and/or display large album art in the tracklist previews (and maybe make those resizable?).