Don’t forget the whole idea of the Aspen Institute to begin with was “the Aspen Ideas as the cross-fertilization of minds.” Co-founder Walter Paepcke’s idea of the Idea was to bring together the best noggins across all kinds of disciplines–including the arts–and allow them to hammer away.

The Aspen Ideas Festival is, of course, that very idea made manifest in a conference now steaming into its third year. But Aspen resident Ken Adelman, the former United Nations ambassador and noted neoconservative, has also taken the notion of cross-fertilization into his beloved realm of the arts.

The result is the Aspen Institute Arts & Contemporary Issues Series, a new initiative spearheaded by Adelman to examine art in its many manifestations as a reflection of politics and society–”including theater, visual arts, architecture, film, television, music, ballet, poetry, fashion, and culinary arts.” The curtain came up on the series Saturday night in a presentation with Julia Hansen’s Theater Masters that honored nine college and graduate school playwrights plus two from local high schools.

Adelman is working on a trio of ideas to begin with that include classical music, sit-coms, and political cartoons. The first–”Mahler, Freud, and Understanding the Mind” will be a summer seminar in collaboration with the Aspen Music Festival and School’s performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony beneath the Benedict Music Tent. Next up will be “Prime Time TV’s Impact” featuring the storied sit-com producer Jay Sandrich, director of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Cosby Show,” and many others. Finally on the docket comes “How Political Cartoons Shape Opinion,” featuring Mike Peters (“Mother Goose” and “Grimm”) and the cartoon editor of The New Yorker in a seminar on politcal cartoons. Peters plans to create “breaking news” cartoons during the seminar.

The new series is also considering seminars on jazz, photography, and fashion design. But this is not Adelman’s first foray into the arts. With his wife, Carol Adelman, Ken Adelman is vice-president of Movers and Shakespeares and began teaching the Bard in 1977 at Georgetown and George Washington Universities.