I have never actually seen this done in 5 years of experience in management. Yes, you occasionally signal this very subtly to your boss's boss (mostly happens when you need to extricate yourself from some fix). But mostly you network with and depend on your boss simply because he has a lot more ways and opportunities of representing your work as stupid to his boss than you ever will of doing that to him.

I worked in a manufacturing set up though, where the number of managers in the whole country was about 200 and most of them, including the top management, knew you at least by name. I guess it could be different in a more competitive new economy/banking sort of workplace or a larger organization.