It was elevated in the (some of the)last major move. But going back through the history of major moves, I see no predictive capabilities. That's actually something I want to research formally. Admittedly, finding a filter to make it a timing tool sounds too holy grail-ish.
I fiddled around with the ratio of $SKEW to $VIX, and it looks like it is somewhat predictive. Using an adaptive moving average (default Kaufman parameters) it appears that the crossovers of the ratio with the moving average do a decent job of keeping one out of major market drops. I seriously doubt it is any better than any number of other indicators, and is likely prone to whipsaw and delay, too. Just food for thought. (And no, I don't really have a terribly rational basis for looking at the ratio. It's just the kind of thing I like to play with.)